This comment will probably be met with a bit of derision, and maybe deservedly so. It is admittedly over-analyzing a bit of micro-community ephemera that probably doesn't warrant such high-falutin' pretense to intellectualism. I can only beg off that I've always seen philosophy as kind of the ultimate 'hack' as it were, and when someone starts intersecting the two worlds of philosophy and software I get really intrigued and find myself compelled to over-comment. The following will not be to everyone's taste, I am mainly responding to Steve here -- and just as an aside, he's invoking some pretty ancient philosophical discussions and doing it well. For those of you bored with such, this is not for you...

That said: I think the trick here is to be careful that we not confuse process philosophy (Whitehead, Bergson, Hartshorne) for pure nominalism, or the pure separation of identity/name/essence from its object. Process philosophers, as I read them, as a general category try to bridge the tension between idealism (the reification of essence or form into an eternal fact) and nominalism (the view that all names/essences are purely ad hoc and never actually representative of the substances they attempt to indicate).

It's not that process philosophers reject essences out of hand, but that they attempt to find more descriptive language that accounts for the constant motion and change of substances. So Bergson had the notion of "Duration" and Whitehead had "occasions" and "ingressions." Names, essences in the process view expanded further along the ontological spectrum than the ad hoc naming of Occam/nominalism, but never so far as Platonic 'ideals' which are eternal and unchanging. It's really, at the bottom of it, not that far from Aristotle himself, but with language that pulls notions of essence further toward immediacy and the Heraclitean flux (i.e., You can't step in the same river twice -- or maybe even once).

All this to say, I wonder if the notion of a 'role' is truly descriptive here -- the role itself changes, as does Subject. The idea of "_why" as a free-floating identity actually, to my mind, moves it further towards an Idealism rather than the process/duration ideas you seem to be advocating. "_why" in this scheme becomes almost a pure abstraction devoid of the context of having been invented and inhabited by Subject.

Questions of essence always become arcane and you can chase this rabbit down countless holes. For the issue at hand, to me it becomes a question of execution rather than definitions. "_why" as a role is only as abstract as Subject makes it. Compare with, say Bob Dylan, who to my mind has spent most of his career negotiating the same dilemma. There's no question that "Dylan" is a character that Robert Zimmerman has been playing and inhabiting for decades, with varying degrees of theater and overlap between real autobiography and pure myth-making. _why/Subject is playing a similar game here probably for similar reasons, and the connection between the two and how much real biography and myth-making is really up to Subject.

In other words, I don't think the idea of "_why" as a free-floating 'role' is completely adequate here -- the narrative is too entangled in the community's mind with Subject for it to become purely abstract/theatrical/literary and divorced from its creator. We're not going to see _why fan-fiction any time soon, and I suspect if anyone else starting writing in the voice of _why, it would quickly be spotted and met with opprobrium. Whatever distance between Subject and the _why role there is remains in the hands of Subject and in the nuance of how he executes the theater of it.

For me personally I've been fascinated with his creative persona since I read the Poignant Guide many years ago and love his creative integrity and sense of whimsy and fun. Totally unique in the software world, and one of the big reasons I was attracted to Ruby in the first place. It'll be fun to see how/if Subject plays this out.