A couple years ago, I passed a very pleasurable hour in front of the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles when the man behind me in line noticed the database book I was reading, and struck up a conversation. Glad I had the luck to rub elbows with one of the Lisp old school. RIP.
Dan was awesome. A few years ago, when I was an undergrad trying to raise money for my first startup in Boston, he was a huge help. Took the time to grab a couple meals with me and explain how things worked, introduced me to angels, and was really insightful. He had no expectation of anything in return - just gave freely of his time and experience.
I wish I had kept in better touch with him. He will be missed.
About a year and a half ago I commented on a blog post he has made (it was a rather minor point in regards to consistency in distributed databases, I think). Dan replied to me via email with a follow up question and we had some correspondence about distributed systems, databases, and (naturally) Lisp. He ended up helping me edit a rough draft of a blog post, which ended up being very well received.
Several things struck me. First, expertise went across many disciplines of CS (from programming languages, to hardware, to databases) and beyond. He could have easily had fame as "Lisp guy", or "object oriented databases guy", or "CPU design guy" but he went above and beyond.
Finally, despite his repute, not only was he approachable (as evidenced by many stories here of folks carrying on correspondence with Dan), but he was curious and interested in learning from others, e.g., he noticed I listed OCaml on my LinkedIn profile and asked a question related to an article Erik Meijer's wrote about Linq and F#.
Very sad to hear it. I really enjoyed hearing Dan's stories from his early days at MIT and his renewed interest in Common Lisp in the past few years was great.
He had a great Google Tech Talk on YouTube/Google Video a few years ago about ITA, but sadly it was taken down for some reason.
I'd love to see his google tech talk. Perhaps, in memory of Dan, google can go through the video and redact any portions they feel are not suitable for public release. Then, repost it to YT.
Is anybody aware of a link to the video that works. After searching for a bit, it seems that every page I visited points the video back to YT. Surely, somebody made a copy of it somewhere???
A shock, to me, as I had no idea he had cancer. And very sad indeed. I didn't know him well, but I was a Zmacs user from the early days. (I still miss Zmacs in some ways.)
I met him @ International Lisp Conference in 2009 and within 10-15 odd minutes of our chat, he taught me so much about airline reservation system (& common lisp) that it will be safe to say that Industry has lost a gem of a person and top notch computer scientist. RIP Sir, you will be missed.
For what it's worth, I had a question I keep on thinking to ask him, but for whatever reason never got around to it. One should settle such questions. Would have loved the memory of his answer.
