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Jim Weirich, Creator of Rake, Has Passed Away

Posted by timothy on from the always-sad-news dept.

SirLurksAlot writes "News is beginning to circulate on Twitter and various sites that Jim Weirich, the creator of Rake, has passed away at the age of 58. He was an active developer (his last commit in the last 24 hours) and has made many contributions to the Ruby community over the years, as well as being a prolific speaker and teacher. He had a great sense of humor and was beloved by many. He will be greatly missed."

7 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What Now? by Camel+Pilot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    WTF is "Rake" and why should anyone care? I gather it's some sort of Ruby thing, but again, why should anyone care?

    Because Make sucks...

  2. 58 is pretty young by jeffmflanagan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's cool that he was still coding right up until his death, but that death was much too early.

    Based on the Wikipedia photo It looks like he spent too much time improving his mind, and not enough taking care of his body.

    If you look like Jim, it's time to change your diet and get active if you want a long healthy life. Tech like FitBit and Jawbone can help. Active gaming using Kinect instead of sitting with a controller, and spending 30 min a day weightlifting did wonders for me.

    You'll feel better, think more clearly, and get positive attention from the opposite sex.

    1. Re: 58 is pretty young by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You don't know the details of what happened. I can tell you the answer is more complicated than not spending enough time working on your body. Sometimes, due to other medical conditions, people are unable to get around like they used to when they were younger. This makes other problems harder to tackle.

      By jumping to conclusions about this man, you are proving to be insensitive and offensive and I hope that you take some time and reflect on that.

    2. Re:58 is pretty young by SpankiMonki · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You might want to consider not criticizing people who encourage others to be healthier.

      I don't think posting a directive for people to change their diets and get active if they "look like Jim" (on the day of the guy's death) qualifies as encouraging others to be healthier. Frankly, it comes off as inconsiderate, disrespectful and condescending.

      But thanks for your concern about everyone's health. I'm sure your internet encouragements are working wonders.

  3. Shocked by Bill_the_Engineer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I was taken aback when I heard the news. My thoughts go out to his family and friends. My understanding is that it may have been a heart attack.

    You will be missed Jim. RIP.

    --
    These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
  4. Jim will be Missed by newlife007 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Jim was a great guy with a good sense of humor. He was very active in the Linux and Programming here in the Cincinnati area. I have known Jim for over 20 years and he will be missed by many. He was a very avid Ruby supporter and also of OpenSource. It is great to see him mentioned here on Slashdot, but a shame to hear the poor comments made about a man who cared about what he did. Free speech or not, it is nice to be respected.

  5. Re:What Now? by Darinbob · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Since when? Make is great. Even more so with GNU Make. It's portable, language agnostic, efficient, fast, scalable, parallelizable, easy to customize, text based, and so forth. This is why Make is still highly popular after 35 years. Yes, there are blogs that attempt to counter every one of those advantages but they also appear to be highly misinformed or biased, or they try to use make as a full all-in-one build system.

    Yes, there are bad makefiles out there, but you can not prevent people using tools that they have not learned well, this is probably the biggest fault. But a fault that exists elsewhere (ie, the person trying to massively customize scons without knowing Python). I actually think that many of the problems people have when using make on bigger systems will actually happen with any automated system, the problem isn't with the tool itself but rather the lack of experience with how to manage a build of a large system, not planning ahead for the complexities that will always come, ending up with a system that was built up incrementally over years.

    I'm not saying Make is perfect but I have not found alternatives that aren't bundled with their own larger set of warts. Rake is not bad (better than many of the alternatives I think), but you have to learn Ruby and its regexps to get stuff done, and it's documentation does not seem as comprehensive and clearly defined as I would like.