Martin "rydis" Rydström, who went missing the 24. of February, has been found but sadly not alive. More information can be found here.

Tags: community, lisp
Current Mood: sad

Today is Richard Stallmans 54. birthday.

RMS, and his Free Software movement, is a controversial person. Personally, I have always been kind of attracted to the somewhat hippie and positive attitude towards the world that RMS is such an exponent for. I do not in any way has his rigour and stamina in the pursuit of the idea, but I can certainly respect him for being so dedicated to what he believes in.

RMS is of course also a big lisp hacker and has worked at the MIT AI lab and thus knows lisp machines intimately. He gave an interesting talk about some of his experiences at ILC 2002.

I sometimes wonder how the world would have looked today, if he had decided to start the GNU project, not by with developing a high quality C toolchain, but rather a Lisp environment.

Having a free and gratis toolchain is not enough to ensure the popularity of a language, but I strongly believe that a language can not become very popular without having also gratis alternatives, which is why I think the existence of free Lisp implementations is a good thing for the Lisp language.

Incidently, today is also the 5. birthday of the release of GNU Emacs 21.2.

Quote of the day
Via Edi Weitz on comp.lang.lisp back in 2004, a quote from Larry Wall:

Lispers are among the best grads of the Sweep-It-Under-Someone-Else's-Carpet School of Simulated Simplicity.

Tags: community, free software, lisp