[HN Gopher] Tom Lord has died
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Tom Lord has died
Author : pcdavid
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-07-19 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (berkeleydailyplanet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (berkeleydailyplanet.com)
| em-bee wrote:
| an editorial about his passing:
|
| https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article...
| bitwize wrote:
| Free software lost a good one. I remember him as the principal
| hacker in the 90s on Guile, which goes with everything.
| kristopolous wrote:
| he was not very old. how unfortunate
| [deleted]
| pantulis wrote:
| He was five years my senior. I never expected to be immortal
| but at my age one starts becoming aware that you have more
| weeks behind your back than in front of you. I like to think
| that living is just untangling a web that somehow fate has
| already set for you. So in the end what counts is living each
| and every moment as if it was the most important one, and
| loving and caring about the people that love and care about
| you.
| mulmen wrote:
| Interesting philosophy, I like it. It seems to reconcile
| self-determinism with fate. Do you believe that life ends
| when you successfully untangle this web?
| pantulis wrote:
| Yes. I will be back to where I was before I was born: not
| being.
|
| Edit: You captured the idea, I am able to determine what
| will be my next steps in life, but once my life has ended
| it will be written in stone. So what's time, what is the
| future and what is the past? I do not care if it's some
| quantum many-worlds interpretation, or a spacetime slice of
| bread that moves with the arrow of time! In this way I am
| already dead, and I am still newborn.
| SloopJon wrote:
| I don't know anything about Tom's situation, and I apologize if
| this in poor taste: a major preventable cause of brain
| hemorrhage is hypertension. If you have high blood pressure,
| it's not a joke. Get treatment.
| gaoshan wrote:
| And the damage is cumulative so the best time to start taking
| any necessary high blood pressure medication is now.
| [deleted]
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Damn. I've been meaning to contact him about some old scheme
| proposals for a couple of years now. He wanted to rebase the
| language on a smaller core.
|
| He wrote very clear comments on lambda-the-ultimate and did great
| things with Guile. If anyone has references to work he published
| please leave a pointer to them.
|
| Brutal reminder to contact people sooner rather than later.
| [deleted]
| throw0101a wrote:
| Seems to have been on HN, but inactive since 2013:
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 (on Guile[1])
|
| * https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dasht
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile
| fossuser wrote:
| There's something sad about reading old comments and emails,
| knowing the mind behind them is gone.
| guenthert wrote:
| Shouldn't be any more sad then reading old books and letters
| of great minds past. Death is necessary part of life. Also
| keeps the living from idling or (arguably) should at least
| ;-}
| falcrist wrote:
| > Death is necessary part of life.
|
| Death is _inevitable_ maybe, but whether it 's _necessary_
| is a philosophical question without a satisfying answer.
| fossuser wrote:
| It is today, but doesn't have to be:
| https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-
| see...
|
| Hopefully we'll fix it one day.
| [deleted]
| yonran wrote:
| He was also very active on twitter
| https://twitter.com/thomas_lord, but I do not know if any of it
| is technology related (as opposed to arguing about communism vs
| capitalism in housing, which is where I know him from).
| shuckles wrote:
| Yeah his participation in local politics was very polarizing,
| to be polite.
| dang wrote:
| Url changed from https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/, which points
| to this.
| troutwine wrote:
| Dang. I'd run into Tom now and again in Berkeley city politics
| circles, never put it together that he was _that_ Tom Lord. I
| hate to know that he's passed like this, all of a sudden. What a
| unique and interesting man he was.
| tra3 wrote:
| Is it this Tom Lord: https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/ ?
|
| It was my first introduction to proper branching/merging support,
| vs RCS and CVS at the time.
| pcdavid wrote:
| Yes apparently: https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/
| alexott wrote:
| Unfortunately yes. That was interesting system before git...
| 0xdky wrote:
| I worked on a POC porting it to Windows and had to port GNU tar
| to support large file names. TLA was truly revolutionary!
| trelane wrote:
| TLA was one of my first too, if not _the_ first foray outside
| CVS.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Imagine how angry tlord would have been to find out they put
| 'open source' in his obituary.
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(page generated 2022-07-19 23:00 UTC)