6 ms·
Joe the office mate
- snazz 8y agoI can’t say I’ve ever seen someone use an issue tracker as a blog before, but it does make sorting the posts dead easy.
- giancarlostoro 8y agoI wish he would of called it an e-zine. Then "Issues" would match the use case... Bring e-zines back dang it! raises wrinkly millennial fist
- giancarlostoro 8y agoA fun side effect of his approach is you can see people who forked off the idea, there's at least two people blogging using this format as well: https://github.com/lukego/blog/network/members https://github.com/lukego/blog/network/members
- toomuchtodo 8y agoIf anyone related to Joe has access to his home directory and knows someone managing his estate who could grant a copyright release, I'd be interested in adding it to the Internet Archive (out of respect). Email in profile.
- peterkelly 8y agohttps://twitter.com/mrsjoeerl https://twitter.com/mrsjoeerl
- saagarjha 8y agoI’d be very cautious as to what from my home directory I’d be ok with going online, even after I died. Much of the material might still have relevance to others, and they might not want it published…
- sleepychu 8y ago> Joe's home directory was a treasure trove of new and old ideas…This was all openly shared over NFS and exciting to explore. Agreed but I suspect that this home directory as exposed on the NFS might be appropriate.
- codr7 8y agoSounds a lot like the stories I've heard about other software legends, or any kind of legends really. Sadly there aren't many places left with enough margin for creativity, it needs space and comes without guarantees.
- smnplk 8y agoI can't believe he died. What a loss.
- apo 8y ago> Joe wrote amazingly simple programs and he did so in a peculiar way. First he wrote down the program any old way just to get it out of his head. Then once it worked he would then immediately create a new directory program2 and write it again. He would repeat this process five or six times (program5, program6, ...) and each time he would understand the problem a little better and sense which parts of the program were essential enough to re-type. He thought this was the most natural thing in the world: of course you throw away the first few implementations, you didn't understand the problem when you wrote those! I thought I was the only one who did that.
- StefanKarpinski 8y agoI often do the same thing.
- galimaufry 8y agoI have heard that J.P. Serre used the same method when writing his books.
- theprotocol 8y agoDoing that made me feel insecure. Reading this helps with that.
- lukego 8y agoJoe also happened to type with only two fingers. Made me realize how little a hyper optimized touch typing style really impacts work outout!
- sleepychu 8y agoYou only need two fingers to type ctrl+space! I'm sure I use more than two fingers but even to increase APM I focused on getting more for my keystrokes rather than more keystrokes.
- rectangletangle 8y agoI often do the same thing with more critical functionality. Though I'm not quite as thorough, usually calling it at iteration 2 or 3.
- _hardwaregeek 8y agoA little selfish of me, but I'm very sad I never got to meet him. Programming is in a rather unique state where most of the foundational people are kept alive in living memory. There's people who can recount working with Dijkstra, or Dennis Richie or Joe Armstrong. Heck, there's probably some people who can remember Von Neumann (Peter Lax?). I really hope we can keep these memories alive. There's nothing really comparable for other fields. Nobody alive today can remember working with Gauss or Riemann. This may be a gross exaggeration, but I believe we'll look back on programming during the mid to late 20th century like we do for physics in the early to mid 20th century. We'll marvel at the amount of talent alive at the same time.
- shocks 8y agoTIL Dijkstra died in 2002. I don't know why, but I always thought he was much older than that!
- hombre_fatal 8y agoProbably because he's cited with the frequency, authority, and timelessness of any major philosopher.
- Stratoscope 8y agoIt's amusing to note that Dijkstra's most famous quote is something he never wrote. Dijkstra submitted a letter to the editor of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM) that he titled "A Case Against the Goto Statement". Niklaus Wirth was editor of CACM at the time, and he changed the title to the infamous "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Considered_harmful Here's the story in Dijkstra's own hand (scroll to the last page of the PDF): http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1308.PDF This is a good reminder that when you read an article with a clickbaity title, don't blame the author, blame the editor.
- masklinn 8y ago
- djhworld 8y agoI've only seen glimpses of this great man from his conference talks on YouTube, but he came across as a very intelligent, relatable and humble person. It's a great loss.
- filleokus 8y agoOne thing I've thought about a lot when people like Joe pass away is that it's somewhat sad that they never are able to receive all the appreciation people give after they are gone. In a parallel culture timeline it is easy to imagine the announcement of someone soon to die (when possible of course), and all these kind words of appreciation from strangers being passed on to the one dying. On the other hand, I guess that the time is better spent with close family, but regardless, I hope that he somewhat understood his importance to so many people all over the world.
- pbourke 8y agoThis seemed to happen with Gord Downie of the Canadian band The Tragically Hip. He was given a diagnosis of terminal brain cancer, but had the energy for a cross-Canada tour a few months later. He was much loved across the country, and though the band’s arena-sellout days were mostly behind them, they blew the doors off with sold out shows at the country’s top venues, culminating in a nationally-televised concert. I’ve always marveled that he got the chance to have this touching denouement to his career, and I’m glad he did. And I’m very thankful that I managed to see them in Vancouver.
- misiti3780 8y agoI thought the same thing! Long time hip fan but grew up south of the boarder :)
- revvx 8y agoSimilar thing happened to Wilko Johnson, guitar player in Dr. Feelgood and actor in Game of Thrones. But in the end he surprisingly ended up surviving his terminal cancer, thanks to his doctors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilko_Johnson#Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilko_Johnson#Cancer
- hyperpape 8y agoIn academia, it is common to do conferences in honor of a major figure’s 60th/70th/80th birthday, and/or a festschrift (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festschrift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festschrift). There’s typically serious work done there, but also a lot talk about they’ve influenced the field, as well as just general reminiscing. You might, for instance, mention the fact that the honored figure once reported his own car stolen because he couldn’t find it, then later found it and got pulled over for driving a stolen vehicle.
- redleggedfrog 8y agoI hope when I die I'll be worthy enough to ascend to whatever is the programmer Valhalla and I'll see Joe there, amongst the other greats. I have never written a line of Enlang, but as I've seen the advantages of loading binaries at run-time as swappable components I get an inkling of the beauty of the idea. It's not near so easy in C# as it appears to be in Erlang. Also, I nominate the name of programmer Valhalla to be called "Greenfield."