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.<p>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.<p>Brutal reminder to contact people sooner rather than later.
Seems to have been on HN, but inactive since 2013:<p>* <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1266032</a> (on Guile[1])<p>* <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dasht" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=dasht</a><p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Guile</a>
Is it this Tom Lord: <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/software/gnu-arch/</a> ?<p>It was my first introduction to proper branching/merging support, vs RCS and CVS at the time.
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.
My his memory be a blessing. Tom's post tracking page at Lambda the Ultimate:<p><a href="http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/3938/track/" rel="nofollow">http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/user/3938/track/</a>
arch has a legitimate claim to have been the first ever distributed version control system.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control</a><p>Not particularly popular though; that probably had something to do with Tom's dogmatism.<p>He was an interesting and entertaining writer though! I had various interactions with him on irc #arch and related mailing lists.
an editorial about his passing:<p><a href="https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article/49843?headline=Berkeley-s-Loss--Becky-O-Malley" rel="nofollow">https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2022-06-26/article...</a>
I have a request for hacker news, in remembering Tom Lord: do you have any of his code lying around? It's hard to find. In addition to GNU arch, I know he once worked on these things:<p>* a c library called hackerlab<p>* a Scheme implementation called Pika Scheme<p>* a regular expression library called rx (may have been renamed to rgx)<p>* an embeddable VM called Furth<p>* a graph reduction engine/functional language runtime of some sort
Url changed from <a href="https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/" rel="nofollow">https://lwn.net/Articles/901807/</a>, which points to this.
> speaking the truth about the climate emergency and treating it as an actual emergency.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>[1] source - personal conversations with those officials and employees about Tom's behavior