Erik and I were colleges in the early nineties. Erik was a very nice person when you met him in person, but completely different in emails.
Eight years ago, I wrote a small web application in perl for a Norwegian law firm in Oslo. Erik had done some consulting for them, and was very friendly when we discussed the project in meetings. But later he was exceptionally harsh in his emails, saying among other things, that I had created some of the biggest security holes he had ever seen.
He rewrote the web application himself in common lisp in a few hours. Creating a framework for web apps on the way. I never invoiced the customer just to avoid any further discussions with Erik.
Erik admitted however, that some of my code was a bit interesting. It was the first time he saw code with unit tests.
His ideas for using lisp instead of xml was brilliant, and it's very said he's gone.
Am I alone in thinking this is guy is an object lesson in how not to live? Was he just a usenet snark-generation unit? Because I've read all the obituaries, and that seems to be the man's mortal summation.
As an extreme encomium, can anyone point to something he actually did?
He contributed many patches to GNU Emacs from version 19.26 to 20.4. A fan of Common Lisp, he took Emacs Lisp in the direction of Common Lisp. He contributed early support for multiple character sets. He quit over the introduction of MULE to GNU Emacs and for a while maintained a “multi-byte survival kit” for Emacs 20 users who wanted Emacs 19 character set behaviour.
afaik he was not much of a contributor to the open source arena. He was however one of very few lisp programmers who had a job, programming in lisp. Someone pointed out that he wrote a billing system among other.
Anybody can be paid to write "lisp" for a living, just work closely with small business owners and provide them with "software solutions". I have been a working Lisper since 2001, pretty much since I bought Winston and Horn and started replacing C++ with it, but I digress.
Eight years ago, I wrote a small web application in perl for a Norwegian law firm in Oslo. Erik had done some consulting for them, and was very friendly when we discussed the project in meetings. But later he was exceptionally harsh in his emails, saying among other things, that I had created some of the biggest security holes he had ever seen.
He rewrote the web application himself in common lisp in a few hours. Creating a framework for web apps on the way. I never invoiced the customer just to avoid any further discussions with Erik.
Erik admitted however, that some of my code was a bit interesting. It was the first time he saw code with unit tests.
His ideas for using lisp instead of xml was brilliant, and it's very said he's gone.