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Re: Daniel Weinreb Died ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)


From: gnuist007
Subject: Re: Daniel Weinreb Died ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)
Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 13:24:02 -0700 (PDT)
User-agent: G2/1.0

On Sep 8, 3:25 am, Xah Lee <xah...@gmail.com> wrote:
> DanielWeinrebDied ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp 
> Programer)http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html
>
> plain text version follows
>
> ------------------------------
>
> DanielWeinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
> Obituary 
> athttp://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifes...
>
> Danielfrequently use comp.lang.lisp. Since about 2007, i became
> acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp
> criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp
> community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know
> he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.
>
> DanielWeinrebused Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder
> of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.
>
> He told me about how emacs keybinding started.
>
>     Source groups.google.com.
>
>     From:DanielWeinreb〔d...@alum.mit.edu〕
>     User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
>     Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp
>     Subject: Re: effective emacs
>
>     xah...@gmail.com wrote:
>     │ Effective Emacs
>     │
>     │ (Long term emacs productivity tips.)
>     │
>     │ Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
>     │
>     │ I have used emacs daily since 1998. Typically, i spent several
> hours
>     │ inside emacs, everyday, for the past 10 years.
>
>     Same for me, except the year is 1977.  Nobody has been using Emacs
>     longer than I have (I was one of the original beta-testers.  I
> refer
>     here to the original Emacs, written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.)
>
>     │ Emacs's default cursor moving shortcuts are “Ctrl+f”, “Ctrl+b”,
> “Ctrl
>     │ +n”, “Ctrl+p”. The keys f, b, n, p are scattered around the
> keyboard
>     │ and are not under the home row.
>
>     That's true.  At the time Guy Steele put together the Emacs
> default
>     key mappings, many people in the target user community (about 20
>     people at MIT!) were already using these key bindings.  It would
>     have been hard to get the new Emacs bindings accepted by the
>     community if they differed for such basic commands.  As you point
>     out, anyone using Emacs can very easily change this based on
>     their own ergonomic preferences.
>
>     │ GOOD
>     │ Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard
>
>     Let me put in a quick plug for my own favorite keyboard, which
>     I am using right now: the Unicomp Customizer:
>
>    http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html
>
>     I like the feel of the keys very much.  I agree with you
>     that it's important, and worth some effort, for everyone
>     to find a keyboard that they feel most comfortable with.
>
>     │ Problem and Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful.
>
>     I generally make few customizations to the key bindings, so
>     that when I work with another programmer, I can turn the
>     keyboard over to them and not cause confusion.
>
>     │ Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”.
>
>     I rarely use the menu bar.  On the other hand, I was raised on an
>     Emacs that didn't have a menu bar, so I could be atypical.  Using
>     the mouse to set point or set the region is great, though, and I
>     use that a lot.
>
>     Here's another piece of historical trivia.  The Emacs keyboard
>     macro feature was inspired by a similar feature in the Stanford
>     DRAW system, an electrical CAD system widely-used by the AI lab
>     hardware hackers at the time.  It was very powerful.  But if you
>     made a mistake, it could really destroy your design, and so it
>     was a good idea to save to disk before running it.  We had a
> saying
>     for what happened if you forgot to save: "A moment of convenience,
>     a lifetime of regret."  This predates the widespread use of "Undo"
>     functionality, surely one of the best ideas for user interfaces
>     ever invented.
>
>     -- Dan
>
> Danielis a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics. Sometimes, you
> can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: 〔Rebuttal to
> Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI 2007-11-11
> ByDanielWeinreb. @ danweinreb.org (local copy
> Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_stallmans_story.txt)〕
>
> Danielalso wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's
> quote from Wikipedia:
>
>     EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was
> the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed byDanielWeinreband 
> Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the
> same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It
> would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which
> itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into
> Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the
> second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.
>
> (for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben
> Wing.)
>
> On occasion i criticized lisp's cons,Danielgently nudged me to give
> detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp
> Problems.
>
> DanielWeinrebhimself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
> Sucks.
>
> One of the popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common
> Lisp implementations. 〔Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
> 2007-12-20 ByDanielWeinreb. @ Source common-lisp.net〕
>
> When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be
> broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web
> Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my tone in the
> criticism)
>
> DanielWeinrebis also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in The
> UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)
>
> Dan's blog is at.http://danweinreb.org/blog/Last entry is just 2
> days ago, where he talks about learning French.
>
> I feel sad that Dan is gone.
>
>  Xah

Its very sad to hear that he has passed away.

Perhaps, the best we can do to keep his legacy is to make sure all of
the surviving works of this student of lisp are put online and made
available to the coming generations.

Here are his publications that I cant find anywhere on the internet.
Xah, it seems that you might have a copy as you were a close friend
and found out about his passing before any of us. What kind of cancer
was he suffering from?

Lisp Machine Zwei
*Weinreb, Daniel L. & Moon, David (January 1979) The Lisp Machine
Manual.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. --
The user interface for Zwei.

ibid. (January 1979) A Real-Time Display-Oriented Editor for the Lisp
Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: S.B. Thesis, MIT Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department. -- How Zwei works
internally.

I would be very much interested in his BS thesis. Who has a copy of
it? You? Stallman? MIT CS department? MIT depository?

Maybe someone can pass this on to the Computer museum in Northern
California or Herbert Stoyan who did extensive work on the Lisp or the
Lucid people.

Regards,
Gnuist



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