(I updated the title, per jacques, so it is straight and clear. The original title was "A mixture of art and engineering" as appears on his follow up.)

Abigail-II has been gone for 13 weeks already. I sort of heard this before, but didn't actually know what happened. Yesterday, I thought I would like to find out what happened, so I read the last thread she particiated. Seriously I couldn't figure out why, even the slightest, other than she did talk loudly with red large font ;-)

Then I went to the last thread Abigail (not Abigail-II) participated, again I found it was difficult to understand the erason she quit for the first time.

Maybe the node she talked loudly was down voted? I don't know, as I didn't vote, so I don't see the numbers.

I thought she probably took something too close to her heart, but there was reall nothing to take to her heart, at least to my level of sensitivity.

Abigail's left didn't hurt this community, on the other hand might benefit everyone here, if we learned something from the incident. I learned (or enforced what I learned from my real life and projects) two:

• Programming is kind of mixture of art and engineering, so it does not go black and white, lots of time it is not about wrong and right, but about the colorful character each author expressed through programming. It is quite normal to see multiple correct solutions to the same problem, even the simplest. To acknowledge that fact does not hurt, but it hurts a project/team, if one insists too much of his/her own solution, especially when this kind of insist come from seniors on the team. After a while, it quickly becomes a one-man project, and clearly set up for failure (might not be this project, but in a long run).
• Maybe not here, but in real life, team work, personal skill and communication are very important to the success of projects. There are situations where you would rather take someone off a project, if that person prevents others from being successful, whatever how good that person is. On the other hand, strong programmer with pleasant personality does help a team the most.

By the way, in real life, I did notice that people who are lack of confidence tend to talk "loudly", as if that helps make points more than the points themselves.

I do wish Abigail come back one day, even as Abigail-III, but with a little bit improvement, maybe even with the same personality, after all, she did contributed as everyone else does. That's just life.

Update:

jryan sent me a private message: "Abigail is a 6'5 Dutch male; not exactly what you'd call a she...". Hm... there were people saying "she" all the time, I don't know, but if that's the case, I didn't do that intentionally.

By the way, I visited jryan's personal node, he does have some very insightful message related to this topic, very good one.