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.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032 (on Guile[1])
User tomlord seems to exist but no comments.
It was my first introduction to proper branching/merging support, vs RCS and CVS at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control
Not particularly popular though; that probably had something to do with Tom's dogmatism.
He was an interesting and entertaining writer though! I had various interactions with him on irc #arch and related mailing lists.
https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article...
* a c library called hackerlab
* a Scheme implementation called Pika Scheme
* a regular expression library called rx (may have been renamed to rgx)
* an embeddable VM called Furth
* a graph reduction engine/functional language runtime of some sort
hackerlab is also part of tla distributions (since the latter uses the former extensively)
hackerlab contains (some version of) rx.
I remember him pitching me on Guile in a hot tub at a conference in the early 90s.
This question motivates a different follow-up question: how should we pay attention? Our senses can be deceived, so we should also use reason and conceptual understandings to literally enrich (de-noise perhaps) our raw senses?
But some philosophies (e.g. Buddhism, or at least some variants of it) emphasizes that ‘conceptual’ understandings can distract us from reality, which is always changing.
Almost every philosophy has paradoxes — some of which have convincing resolutions. I’m hoping to hear more points of view…
Unfortunately this advocacy frequently took unproductive directions, being abusive to elected officials and staff at the local and state levels,[1] and opposing changes that would help move things in the right direction climate-wise, such as building more in-fill housing in Berkeley, because some other action (say, convincing people to massively reduce their energy usage) was an even better strategy in his eyes. Tom was not convinced for example that Berkeley needed any more housing.
The source of this post is a good clue; Berkeley Daily Planet mostly publishes posts from NIMBY's who don't care about the climate and don't want anything that could possibly increase the number of people who live in Berkeley (Zelda Bronstein and Toni Mester are good examples).
Having interacted with Tom on Twitter, and reading through the comments here, I'm surprised to learn that he was a valued member of an open source community and published software that people used at one point.
[1] source - personal conversations with those officials and employees about Tom's behavior
But he had a lot of skill to back it up with, too. I remember when QuickCheck first appeared, someone used it to test the correctness of various regexp libraries, and Tom Lord's was one of the very few which passed.
He wasn't without controversy, even at a time when the free software culture was even less interested than today in being nice when you could be right[tm] instead.
But let's leave it at that here.
Coddling the egos of these "authorities" should be low priority considering the dire nature of the situation. If they drive us off a cliff because the constituents weren't "nice", it's still their fault.
He was also removed from occasionally appearing on Berkeley Zoning and Advisory Board because he couldn't get along with the elected official for his district.
That is not a source. That is a personal opinion reported. Politics. Bullshit. Together forever
Leaving it unspecified so you can't reliably is the issue that does not exist here.
