Why? Such me.

(Originally posted as a reply on Miyagawa's blog post on _why's disappearance.)

I miss collaborating with _why, too, and it was sad to see that one of _why's parting (re)tweet was:

"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 pressed me on use.perl about why I have not released Perl 6 already, but instead taking 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.