Those familiar with the Ruby community are immediately familiar with Why, aka _why and Why the Lucky Stiff, the pseudonym of a Ruby hacker, artist, and musician. Why wrote numerous Ruby libraries, including the Hpricot library for HTML parsing. He also wrote Why's (poignant) Guide to Ruby, a whimsical guide to learning how to use the Ruby programming language.

Unfortunately, Why has gone missing online. His GitHub source code repositories were deleted, his Twitter account was closed, and all of his websites are down. Jury's still out on whether Why has simply flown the coop, or whether something worse has happened. This last Twitter posts indicate a sort of nihilistic view of programming.

If he's gone (for any use of the term "gone"), it's really a shame. The programming community could use more creative, genuinely nice figures like him.

Maybe _why is taking a time off..