_why

So _why disappeared from the internet. I'm a perl guy and have never met him in person in conferences or anywhere, but have been always inspired by his crazy wonderful code, like camping.

I actually remembered that I once exchanged an email with him 3 years ago, and he was quite nice. In January 2006 I was in Taipei and hacked with Audrey Tang (at that time Autrijus) on porting _why's syck YAML parser and encoder to perl, and then implement JSON::Syck as a subset. It was long before JSON RFC was published, and it wasn't clear how to encode high-bit characters in JSON: UTF-8 bytes or Unicode encoded form (\uXXXX).  Well, see it's still confusing some libraries :)

I sent an email to Audrey, Douglas Crockford (the author of JSON) and _why:

Hi,

JSON spec says "A string is a collection of zero or more Unicode
characters, wrapped in double quotes, using backslash escapes. A
character is represented as a single character string." but i can't
get what it exactly means.

Suppose, when you pass utf-8 bytes from Perl to JSON, what are we
supposed to do to encode it into JSON? Should it be "{utf-8 bytes}",
or "\uXXXX"?

Douglas replied to me respectfully:

These are good questions. JSON is concerned with characters, not bytes.
The \uXXXX should be used to encode UTF-16 codes, not byte codes.

JavaScript never sees the original encoding. It only sees the UCS-2
material that the browser produces from it. So the thing that Syck 
is doing is wrong.

Also see http://www.crockford.com/JSON/draft-jsonorg-json-00.txt

Note that when Douglas said "the thing that Syck is doing is wrong" it's not _why's syck but our perl Syck binding we worked on at that time. We then exchanged another set of replies for more clarification but then we figured out what's currently specified in JSON RFC today.

Later _why replied to me privately:

Mmmmnn. Good questions, all. Good answers as well. I value you tremendously
already.

That's very kind, and even though I've never met him in person I could easily imagine what kind of personality he has. I'll be missing his appearance on the web and his code (though it's already mirrored by lots of people), but thank you _why.

Comments

[audreyt]

I miss collaborating with _why, too, and it was sad to see that one of _why's parting (re)tweets is: "programming is rather thankless. u see your works become replaced by superior ones in a year. unable to run at all in a few more."

I had such an emotional breakdown in Brazil, when chromatic rather insistently presses me on use.perl about why I have not released Perl 6 already, but instead take up precious mind-share from the Parrot project.

He made it all sounds like it's my fault that Perl 6 was delayed, with my well-intentioned but ill-fated attempt at trying to implement it.

He had apologized swiftly the next day on IRC -- I was paralyzed and cannot log in, but I read the logs from #perl6, but it hurt a lot, and burnt for a very long time.

Back then all I could think about is, well then, let my identity be cancelled; code never lasts more than a decade anyway, and I can transfer my hard disk -- and my memory -- to Flavio, and disappear from this particular belief circle entirely.

It's been years ago, and I've reconcilled with chromatic when I was extremely ill with Hepatitis. He didn't really mean it that harshly; he was just anxious. Also, the same words just don't mean the same meanings to each of us.

Then I found some other fixation point, and simply disappeared; I'm glad, though, that I did not leave a self-destructive note like David did with Darcs; though I'm sure David didn't really mean it that way, either.

Well, such is The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.

Now I'm (gradually) back to hacking, and tweeting, and githubbing; I can't really say "what didn't kill me made me stronger", but when one resurfaces, one brings newly dived/drived/derived wisdom from other worlds -- underworlds -- as well.

So I hope that _why resurface some day, not neccessarily in programming, but in life. Soul-shards like the emails you quoted also kept him alive in each of _why's collaborators, and _that_ -- a tradition of human memories -- may last longer than code, if not as precise as code.

[[email protected]]

I always thought that _why was Cary Brothers. They look like twins and coincidently he released an album at the same time as Why's disappearance. The title "Who You Are" http://www.carybrothers.com/