The freaking out I think is ludicrous. The psychoanalysis, well... I liked the eulogy, and I like the postings of his quotes. I didn't mind this post, but I took it more to be a "look at how this guy made a programming manual moving" than a "look at how he let us know what was going to happen." I'll upvote anything featuring the (P)G.
I do find it silly that this has become so fevered in 24 hours' time. I'd find it hilarious if two days from know _why set up his Twitter and his web site again and was all, "Hey guys, I'm back, how you doing."
By psychoanalysis, I mean all the people talking about why he did this, what he was thinking, etc. Going on about his tweats and things he put in his books and treating them as "clues" is just one expression of that.
I agree. That's all dumb. I didn't think people were being serious about that.
Hell, if there's one thing we do know it's that we didn't get to see _why in his early developing years. When he joined the community, he was already a bright, talented guy with an assortment of interests. It's harder to look at somebody and figure out what they were thinking if you've only ever seen them when they were fairly mature.
EDIT: Oh, I could actually check your profile. Some people fill those out.
"Going on about <something>" is an idiom I've encountered in Texas and seems common throughout the Southeastern US as well. You can get the essential meaning by thinking of it as a shortening of "Going on at length about <something>" with strong implication of excessive length, though it can be (and often is) used to apply to whole discussions among multiple people.
Can we just truncate the thread at this point? The entire tree underneath here (as it stands now) is entirely inappropriate. Some of the posts even have > 1 upvotes.
Should they not be -1?
I do find it silly that this has become so fevered in 24 hours' time. I'd find it hilarious if two days from know _why set up his Twitter and his web site again and was all, "Hey guys, I'm back, how you doing."