I didn't out him. That had already happened.

The debate -- a debate about journalistic ethics I consider really interesting, by the way -- is about whether I should have publicized the outing, whether I overstepped boundaries in reporting, and whether I should have published additional details that were not common knowledge.

Fact is the guy created a persona that many people found themselves intellectually and emotionally invested in, and it doesn't appear as though he ever made a clear statement about wanting to be left alone. Disappearing doesn't count as a clear statement because there's obviously much contention about the situation. His actions had consequences, whether he likes it or not.

While people here can theorize and debate about what should and shouldn't happen with respect to those consequences, the most straightforward thing to do is just to ask him for a definitive statement - which is precisely what you did. And now that his response and statement is on record the matter should never be an issue again. I really don't see a problem with your actions.

Great article by the way. Your experience attempting to create a program in a Word document made me laugh and reminded me of when I started teaching myself how computers worked. 20 years ago when I was 8 and disk space was expensive, I thought I was very clever when I found a program that could change the size of files on my computer. It didn't make any sense how it could possibly work, but I went ahead any way and "shrunk" a bunch of files down to zero size, effectively deleting everything important on the computer. Nowadays banks and other financial institutions trust me to program for them; little do they know! ;)

Although I'm peripherally connected to the Ruby world (I spent much of today programming in Ruby for money, occasionally go to the local Ruby user group, etc.), and I saw _why perform a punk rock song about the grammar of Ruby at OSCON one year, I didn't know his name until you outed him in this article.

Just because you didn't know about it, or didn't care to find out, doesn't mean that she outed him. In a similar manner, if a tree falls in the forest and you didn't hear it crashing down, that does not indicate that the tree is still standing. I find your logic problematic.

Let's be clear about something: she did not out _why. Some other people did that years ago, and I've known his true identity for longer than that but the people who were his real fans never outed him even though they knew, too. _why was a little like Santa Claus in that way.