
Shiro Kawai: Schemer, Lisper, Actor - emmanueloga_
I was on my annual exploration of Scheme implementations, this time I focused my attention on Gauche for the first time...<p>I was surprised to find the twitter profile of the author, Shiro Kawai [1]. It turns out he also is a professional actor, has an imdb profile [2] and has been part of a lot of movies! People like this always make me feel [even more!] unaccomplished :-).<p>Anyway, thought it would be fun to ask here who knows of other multi-talented software developers.<p>1: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;anohana" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;anohana</a><p>2: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imdb.me&#x2F;shirokawai" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imdb.me&#x2F;shirokawai</a>
======
dig1
He also wrote a few [1][2] papers on how they used Scheme for movie
production. One of those movies is "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" [3].
This movie was released 2001 and had one of the most advanced animations at
that time.

Gauche scheme should get more attention because of stability and lean design.
It is also actively maintained for last 20 years.

[1] [http://practical-scheme.net/docs/jlugm2000.html](http://practical-
scheme.net/docs/jlugm2000.html)

[2] [http://practical-scheme.net/docs/gdc2002.html](http://practical-
scheme.net/docs/gdc2002.html)

[3]
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840/)

~~~
9214
Kudos for mentioning the relation between FF:SW and Scheme, I didn't know
that! This is one of my favorite movies since I was a kid. Pity the
documentary [1] doesn't mention any of that.

The ideas from Gaia theory and neovitalism in it are what eventually got me
into my MS program (neurorehabilitation & bio-signal processing), and
venerable SICP was the first programming book that really clicked with me.
Heck, I even bought a phantom figurine for my working desk.

Speaking of actors, "Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams" [2] has a whole chapter
discussing Aki Ross (the main protagonist) as the first virtual actress, with
a very interesting rhetoric (an excerpt follows):

Final Fantasy is made disturbing by the fact that not only the Phantoms but
the human characters as well appear undead. The ontological uncertainty of
these digital humans has several sources. While the Phantoms derive part of
their proliferating, malignant vitality from the human spirits they prey on,
the filmʼs CGI humans literally "vampirize" the motion-capture actors who
modeled them. The elastic, dot-constellation figures produced by the computer
from motion-capture data provided by real human actors absorbed, as it were,
the latterʼs "lifeblood", which then became the "living material" of the
digital actorʼs "lifelike" behavior.

[1]:
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1634340/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1634340/)

[2]: [https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/robot-
ghosts-...](https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/robot-ghosts-and-
wired-dreams)

------
emmanueloga_
Aliette de Bodard [1] is a French-American speculative fiction writer. A
graduate of École Polytechnique, she works as a software engineer specializing
in image processing.

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliette_de_Bodard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliette_de_Bodard)

------
vga805
Another multi-talented developer that comes to mind is the distinguished
philosopher John McFarlane. He created pandoc, among some other things.

[https://johnmacfarlane.net/index.html](https://johnmacfarlane.net/index.html)

------
Gatsky
[https://usesthis.com/interviews/shiro.kawai/](https://usesthis.com/interviews/shiro.kawai/)

~~~
emmanueloga_
Cool to see he seems fond of Clojure!, one of his second choices after Gauche

------
emmanueloga_
Found someone else: Vienna Teng [1], is an American pianist and singer-
songwriter, computer science graduate that used to work at Cisco.

From her website bio: "These days, all that training mostly manifests itself
in overly clever spreadsheet formulas." :-D

1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Teng](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Teng)

------
e40
I worked with Shiro and he's a really nice guy and very smart. Yes, he wrote
Lisp code for us. Our regex engine. Very high quality. He also plays the piano
very well, I hear.

~~~
single_source
Do you mind elaborating on what you mean by "Our regex engine"? I'd love to
hear more about what you needed a regex engine written in Lisp for.

~~~
e40
Shiro wrote our "new" regex engine, to replace the one written in the 80's. It
has served us very well.

[https://franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/regexp.h...](https://franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/regexp.htm)

(I say new, because it's a bunch of years old, at this point... I forget when
he did it)

------
quickthrower2
I’ve given up worrying about being unaccomplished in comparison to people I
find on HN. Yeah normal curves gonna have outliers. Your probably an outlier
yourself and maybe this guy is further out. So what. I’m not even good enough
to attend a TEDX as an audience member apparently! Oh well there’re all on
YouTube, and I watched live on a repeater screen.

~~~
emmanueloga_
Fair!

I've heard the advice of only comparing myself against myself in the past,
etc, I think it makes sense. Sometimes (often) I forget about all that.

On a positive note, it _is_ pretty cool when I have a moment of clarity I and
I manage to see accomplished people as inspiration instead of feeling behind.

~~~
quickthrower2
That’s a great way to think about it. And sometimes they can be a mentor too!

------
rurban
I have an IMDb (with a Sundance winner and a documentary about myself as
president of the local surf club), was a pretty good Architect with some of
the most famous modern buildings (Steinhaus, Resowi, ...) in Austria, and
worked in Formula 1 as engineer (cannot talk about that, but Mercedes should
thank me a lot for their current run).

[https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch?role=nm7259427](https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch?role=nm7259427)

------
emmanueloga_
Ok, to not spam this post anymore, here's a SPARQL query that returns some
people Wikidata knows about that _both_ have a "computer related" profession
and more than 2 professions.

[https://w.wiki/Z8E](https://w.wiki/Z8E)

Took me a while to come up with something that wouldn't timeout... not sure
why I spent so much time with this

------
bjoli
He contributes amazing feedback to the SRFI (scheme request for
implementation) process and I suspect also the r7rs process. Being the author
of a good scheme implentation makes his feedback even more valuable, imho.

He also manages to always be very kind and seems curious in the mailing lists.

------
fomine3
I heard a Japanese Podcast he attend, How he literally made Z80 "DIY PC" in
child era is amazing.

------
scott31
There is Paul Graham: computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture
capitalist, and author[0]

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_\(programmer\))

~~~
submeta
Why the downvotes?

~~~
ngcc_hk
Because you are in his site!

