
R.I.P. Phil Bagwell - SanderMak
http://blog.typesafe.com/rip-phil-bagwell
======
fogus
Some background on the kind of person Phil Bagwell was and his contributions
<http://blog.fogus.me/2012/10/15/phil-bagwell-rest-in-peace>

Of particular note is his work creating Hash Array Mapped Tries (aka
functional associative arrays) detailed in
<http://lampwww.epfl.ch/papers/idealhashtrees.pdf> and implemented in Haskell,
Clojure, Scala and Rubinius. His latest work involved lock-free versions
called CTrees[1] that are likely to create more waves as others become
familiar with them.

[1]: <https://github.com/axel22/Ctries>

~~~
carterschonwald
is there a good spot to find all the papers he's coauthored?

~~~
SanderMak
Here's a start: [http://www.informatik.uni-
trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/...](http://www.informatik.uni-
trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/b/Bagwell:Phil.html) doesn't include technical
reports though.

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rossjudson
See <http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/64410/files/techlists.pdf> for one of
Phil's most influential papers. Surprising (and saddening) to hear of his
passing. See also <http://lampwww.epfl.ch/~prokopec/ctries-snapshot.pdf> for a
more recent contribution.

~~~
marshray
Wow, this Ctrie looks like a concurrent Swiss Army data structure. Very
interesting, thanks.

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notlisted
Might I inquire how/of what? I know it shouldn't matter, but I'm always
curious when the cause of death is not listed. I've read too many of these
where smart people decide to leave us of their own accord. WikiPedia was no
help.

~~~
bad_user
That's just the animal inside you that's hungry for gossip talking, because it
really doesn't matter. And I know you'll come up with some kind of
rationalization for wanting to know, but you should respect the wishes of
family and close friends, whatever the reasons may be, especially because it
really does not matter, the loss being the same with or without the reason
your gossip-hungry brain may expect.

~~~
notlisted
Indeed, this has nothing to do with gossip, but everything with the prevalence
of depression & burnout in the tech field. It was addressed by Joel from Fog
creek several years ago.

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pjscott
Phil Bagwell's VList is a really cute data structure. It's an immutable list
with O(1) cons and cdr, lookups that are expected constant time and O(lg n)
worst-case time, and better cache locality than linked lists. The wikipedia
entry is short and understandable, which makes it easy to honor the dead in a
pleasant and enlightening way:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VList>

Obviously a very clever guy.

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tiarkrompf
Here is a collection of all his papers:
[http://infoscience.epfl.ch/search?ln=en&p=bagwell](http://infoscience.epfl.ch/search?ln=en&p=bagwell)

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drcode
Phil's ideas on data structures are a critical corner stone in making
functional programming easy and practical. Though most people may not have
heard his name before, his influence on some computer languages was HUGE.

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ffk
Considering his contributions, can we have a black bar today?

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millerm
I had the pleasure of having a very long, beer filled conversation about tech,
computer languages and culture with Phil while at ClojureConj in Raleigh last
year. He was a very intelligent and charismatic man. It's amazing how sad the
death of someone you had only known for a short moment can be.

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sbochins
I never heard of this guy, but after reading this I realized I know about the
data structure he invited that is used in Clojure and other functional
languages. We should celebrate the important impact he had on technology. His
work will live on.

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noelwelsh
I only met Phil once, but it was his suggestion that led to the formation of
Underscore, where I now work. I hoped I'd get a chance to say thanks, but now
that opportunity is gone.

~~~
berserkpi
I'm a newbie on Functional Programming.

But I'm changing that, trying hard at least. 2 things have been a great
influence for me: Underscore.js and learning scala at coursera.org.

Perhaps, at some level, I owe these new skills to Phil.

RIP

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joshhart
I met Phil at Scaladays in 2011. He was such a nice guy. I remember having
some ideas about how to improve the efficiency of hash array trie maps for
certain cases and types of data and I remember how encouraging our
conversation was. He'll be missed.

