Daniel Weinreb Died ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)

Discussion:

(too old to reply)

Xah Lee

2012-09-08 10:25:21 UTC

Daniel Weinreb Died ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)
http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html

plain text version follows

------------------------------

Daniel Weinreb died today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
Obituary at http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=159710898

Daniel frequently use comp.lang.lisp. Since about 2007, i became
acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp
criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp
community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know
he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.

Daniel Weinreb used Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder
of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.

He told me about how emacs keybinding started.

Source groups.google.com.

From: Daniel Weinreb 〔***@alum.mit.edu〕
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: effective emacs

***@gmail.com wrote:
│ Effective Emacs
│
│ (Long term emacs productivity tips.)
│
│ Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
│
│ I have used emacs daily since 1998. Typically, i spent several
hours
│ inside emacs, everyday, for the past 10 years.

Same for me, except the year is 1977. Nobody has been using Emacs
longer than I have (I was one of the original beta-testers. I
refer
here to the original Emacs, written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.)

│ Emacs's default cursor moving shortcuts are “Ctrl+f”, “Ctrl+b”,
“Ctrl
│ +n”, “Ctrl+p”. The keys f, b, n, p are scattered around the
keyboard
│ and are not under the home row.

That's true. At the time Guy Steele put together the Emacs
default
key mappings, many people in the target user community (about 20
people at MIT!) were already using these key bindings. It would
have been hard to get the new Emacs bindings accepted by the
community if they differed for such basic commands. As you point
out, anyone using Emacs can very easily change this based on
their own ergonomic preferences.

│ GOOD
│ Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard

Let me put in a quick plug for my own favorite keyboard, which
I am using right now: the Unicomp Customizer:

http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html

I like the feel of the keys very much. I agree with you
that it's important, and worth some effort, for everyone
to find a keyboard that they feel most comfortable with.

│ Problem and Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful.

I generally make few customizations to the key bindings, so
that when I work with another programmer, I can turn the
keyboard over to them and not cause confusion.

│ Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”.

I rarely use the menu bar. On the other hand, I was raised on an
Emacs that didn't have a menu bar, so I could be atypical. Using
the mouse to set point or set the region is great, though, and I
use that a lot.

Here's another piece of historical trivia. The Emacs keyboard
macro feature was inspired by a similar feature in the Stanford
DRAW system, an electrical CAD system widely-used by the AI lab
hardware hackers at the time. It was very powerful. But if you
made a mistake, it could really destroy your design, and so it
was a good idea to save to disk before running it. We had a
saying
for what happened if you forgot to save: "A moment of convenience,
a lifetime of regret." This predates the widespread use of "Undo"
functionality, surely one of the best ideas for user interfaces
ever invented.

-- Dan

Daniel is a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics. Sometimes, you
can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: 〔Rebuttal to
Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI 2007-11-11
By Daniel Weinreb. @ danweinreb.org (local copy
Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_stallmans_story.txt)〕

Daniel also wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's
quote from Wikipedia:

EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was
the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed by Daniel
Weinreb and Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the
same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It
would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which
itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into
Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the
second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.

(for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben
Wing.)

On occasion i criticized lisp's cons, Daniel gently nudged me to give
detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp
Problems.

Daniel Weinreb himself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
Sucks.

One of the popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common
Lisp implementations. 〔Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
2007-12-20 By Daniel Weinreb. @ Source common-lisp.net〕

When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be
broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web
Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my tone in the
criticism)

Daniel Weinreb is also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in The
UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)

Dan's blog is at. http://danweinreb.org/blog/ Last entry is just 2
days ago, where he talks about learning French.

I feel sad that Dan is gone.

Xah

2012-09-09 20:08:30 UTC

Permalink

In article

Post by Xah Lee
I feel sad that Dan is gone.

+1

Or perhaps that should be

(incf *)

rg

g***@hotmail.com

2012-10-27 20:24:02 UTC

Permalink

DanielWeinrebDied ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html
plain text version follows
------------------------------
DanielWeinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
Obituary athttp://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifes...
Danielfrequently use comp.lang.lisp. Since about 2007, i became
acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp
criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp
community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know
he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.
DanielWeinrebused Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder
of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.
He told me about how emacs keybinding started.
Source groups.google.com.
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: effective emacs
│ Effective Emacs
│
│ (Long term emacs productivity tips.)
│
│ Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
│
│ I have used emacs daily since 1998. Typically, i spent several
hours
│ inside emacs, everyday, for the past 10 years.
Same for me, except the year is 1977. Nobody has been using Emacs
longer than I have (I was one of the original beta-testers. I
refer
here to the original Emacs, written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.)
│ Emacs's default cursor moving shortcuts are “Ctrl+f”, “Ctrl+b”,
“Ctrl
│ +n”, “Ctrl+p”. The keys f, b, n, p are scattered around the
keyboard
│ and are not under the home row.
That's true. At the time Guy Steele put together the Emacs
default
key mappings, many people in the target user community (about 20
people at MIT!) were already using these key bindings. It would
have been hard to get the new Emacs bindings accepted by the
community if they differed for such basic commands. As you point
out, anyone using Emacs can very easily change this based on
their own ergonomic preferences.
│ GOOD
│ Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard
Let me put in a quick plug for my own favorite keyboard, which
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html
I like the feel of the keys very much. I agree with you
that it's important, and worth some effort, for everyone
to find a keyboard that they feel most comfortable with.
│ Problem and Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful.
I generally make few customizations to the key bindings, so
that when I work with another programmer, I can turn the
keyboard over to them and not cause confusion.
│ Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”.
I rarely use the menu bar. On the other hand, I was raised on an
Emacs that didn't have a menu bar, so I could be atypical. Using
the mouse to set point or set the region is great, though, and I
use that a lot.
Here's another piece of historical trivia. The Emacs keyboard
macro feature was inspired by a similar feature in the Stanford
DRAW system, an electrical CAD system widely-used by the AI lab
hardware hackers at the time. It was very powerful. But if you
made a mistake, it could really destroy your design, and so it
was a good idea to save to disk before running it. We had a
saying
for what happened if you forgot to save: "A moment of convenience,
a lifetime of regret." This predates the widespread use of "Undo"
functionality, surely one of the best ideas for user interfaces
ever invented.
-- Dan
Danielis a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics. Sometimes, you
can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: 〔Rebuttal to
Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI 2007-11-11
Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_stallmans_story.txt)〕
Danielalso wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's
EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was
the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed byDanielWeinreband Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the
same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It
would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which
itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into
Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the
second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.
(for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben
Wing.)
On occasion i criticized lisp's cons,Danielgently nudged me to give
detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp
Problems.
DanielWeinrebhimself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
Sucks.
One of the popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common
Lisp implementations. 〔Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be
broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web
Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my tone in the
criticism)
DanielWeinrebis also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in The
UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)
Dan's blog is at.http://danweinreb.org/blog/Last entry is just 2
days ago, where he talks about learning French.
I feel sad that Dan is gone.
Xah

Its very sad to hear that he has passed away.

Perhaps, the best we can do to keep his legacy is to make sure all of
the surviving works of this student of lisp are put online and made
available to the coming generations.

Here are his publications that I cant find anywhere on the internet.
Xah, it seems that you might have a copy as you were a close friend
and found out about his passing before any of us. What kind of cancer
was he suffering from?

Lisp Machine Zwei
*Weinreb, Daniel L. & Moon, David (January 1979) The Lisp Machine
Manual.

Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. --
The user interface for Zwei.

ibid. (January 1979) A Real-Time Display-Oriented Editor for the Lisp
Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: S.B. Thesis, MIT Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department. -- How Zwei works
internally.

I would be very much interested in his BS thesis. Who has a copy of
it? You? Stallman? MIT CS department? MIT depository?

Maybe someone can pass this on to the Computer museum in Northern
California or Herbert Stoyan who did extensive work on the Lisp or the
Lucid people.

Regards,
Gnuist

Cortez

2012-10-27 21:48:51 UTC

Permalink

Post by g***@hotmail.com

DanielWeinrebDied ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html
plain text version follows
------------------------------
DanielWeinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
Obituary athttp://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifes...
Danielfrequently use comp.lang.lisp. Since about 2007, i became
acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp
criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp
community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know
he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.
DanielWeinrebused Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder
of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.
He told me about how emacs keybinding started.
Source groups.google.com.
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: effective emacs
│ Effective Emacs
│
│ (Long term emacs productivity tips.)
│
│ Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
│
│ I have used emacs daily since 1998. Typically, i spent several
hours
│ inside emacs, everyday, for the past 10 years.
Same for me, except the year is 1977. Nobody has been using Emacs
longer than I have (I was one of the original beta-testers. I
refer
here to the original Emacs, written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.)
│ Emacs's default cursor moving shortcuts are “Ctrl+f”, “Ctrl+b”,
“Ctrl
│ +n”, “Ctrl+p”. The keys f, b, n, p are scattered around the
keyboard
│ and are not under the home row.
That's true. At the time Guy Steele put together the Emacs
default
key mappings, many people in the target user community (about 20
people at MIT!) were already using these key bindings. It would
have been hard to get the new Emacs bindings accepted by the
community if they differed for such basic commands. As you point
out, anyone using Emacs can very easily change this based on
their own ergonomic preferences.
│ GOOD
│ Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard
Let me put in a quick plug for my own favorite keyboard, which
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html
I like the feel of the keys very much. I agree with you
that it's important, and worth some effort, for everyone
to find a keyboard that they feel most comfortable with.
│ Problem and Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful.
I generally make few customizations to the key bindings, so
that when I work with another programmer, I can turn the
keyboard over to them and not cause confusion.
│ Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”.
I rarely use the menu bar. On the other hand, I was raised on an
Emacs that didn't have a menu bar, so I could be atypical. Using
the mouse to set point or set the region is great, though, and I
use that a lot.
Here's another piece of historical trivia. The Emacs keyboard
macro feature was inspired by a similar feature in the Stanford
DRAW system, an electrical CAD system widely-used by the AI lab
hardware hackers at the time. It was very powerful. But if you
made a mistake, it could really destroy your design, and so it
was a good idea to save to disk before running it. We had a
saying
for what happened if you forgot to save: "A moment of convenience,
a lifetime of regret." This predates the widespread use of "Undo"
functionality, surely one of the best ideas for user interfaces
ever invented.
-- Dan
Danielis a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics. Sometimes, you
can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: 〔Rebuttal to
Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI 2007-11-11
Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_stallmans_story.txt)〕
Danielalso wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's
EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was
the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed byDanielWeinreband Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the
same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It
would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which
itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into
Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the
second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.
(for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben
Wing.)
On occasion i criticized lisp's cons,Danielgently nudged me to give
detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp
Problems.
DanielWeinrebhimself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
Sucks.
One of the popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common
Lisp implementations. 〔Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be
broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web
Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my tone in the
criticism)
DanielWeinrebis also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in The
UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)
Dan's blog is at.http://danweinreb.org/blog/Lastentry is just 2
days ago, where he talks about learning French.
I feel sad that Dan is gone.
Xah

He wasn't just a student of Lisp, he helped create CL.

Post by g***@hotmail.com
Here are his publications that I cant find anywhere on the internet.
Xah, it seems that you might have a copy as you were a close friend
and found out about his passing before any of us.

I don't think Xah Lee knew him personally.

Post by g***@hotmail.com
What kind of cancer was he suffering from?

Leukaemia, I believe.

Post by g***@hotmail.com
Lisp Machine Zwei
*Weinreb, Daniel L. & Moon, David (January 1979) The Lisp Machine
Manual.

http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/mit/cadr/chinual_3rdEd_Mar81.pdf

Also plenty more stuff under http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/mit/cadr

Cortez

2012-10-27 21:59:47 UTC

Permalink

Post by Cortez

Post by g***@hotmail.com

DanielWeinrebDied ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html
plain text version follows
------------------------------
DanielWeinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
Obituary athttp://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifes...
Danielfrequently use comp.lang.lisp. Since about 2007, i became
acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp
criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp
community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know
he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.
DanielWeinrebused Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder
of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.
He told me about how emacs keybinding started.
Source groups.google.com.
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: effective emacs
│ Effective Emacs
│
│ (Long term emacs productivity tips.)
│
│ Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
│
│ I have used emacs daily since 1998. Typically, i spent several
hours
│ inside emacs, everyday, for the past 10 years.
Same for me, except the year is 1977. Nobody has been using Emacs
longer than I have (I was one of the original beta-testers. I
refer
here to the original Emacs, written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.)
│ Emacs's default cursor moving shortcuts are “Ctrl+f”, “Ctrl+b”,
“Ctrl
│ +n”, “Ctrl+p”. The keys f, b, n, p are scattered around the
keyboard
│ and are not under the home row.
That's true. At the time Guy Steele put together the Emacs
default
key mappings, many people in the target user community (about 20
people at MIT!) were already using these key bindings. It would
have been hard to get the new Emacs bindings accepted by the
community if they differed for such basic commands. As you point
out, anyone using Emacs can very easily change this based on
their own ergonomic preferences.
│ GOOD
│ Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard
Let me put in a quick plug for my own favorite keyboard, which
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html
I like the feel of the keys very much. I agree with you
that it's important, and worth some effort, for everyone
to find a keyboard that they feel most comfortable with.
│ Problem and Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful.
I generally make few customizations to the key bindings, so
that when I work with another programmer, I can turn the
keyboard over to them and not cause confusion.
│ Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”.
I rarely use the menu bar. On the other hand, I was raised on an
Emacs that didn't have a menu bar, so I could be atypical. Using
the mouse to set point or set the region is great, though, and I
use that a lot.
Here's another piece of historical trivia. The Emacs keyboard
macro feature was inspired by a similar feature in the Stanford
DRAW system, an electrical CAD system widely-used by the AI lab
hardware hackers at the time. It was very powerful. But if you
made a mistake, it could really destroy your design, and so it
was a good idea to save to disk before running it. We had a
saying
for what happened if you forgot to save: "A moment of convenience,
a lifetime of regret." This predates the widespread use of "Undo"
functionality, surely one of the best ideas for user interfaces
ever invented.
-- Dan
Danielis a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics. Sometimes, you
can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: 〔Rebuttal to
Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI 2007-11-11
Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_stallmans_story.txt)〕
Danielalso wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's
EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was
the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed byDanielWeinreband Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the
same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It
would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which
itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into
Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the
second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.
(for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben
Wing.)
On occasion i criticized lisp's cons,Danielgently nudged me to give
detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp
Problems.
DanielWeinrebhimself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
Sucks.
One of the popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common
Lisp implementations. 〔Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be
broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web
Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my tone in the
criticism)
DanielWeinrebis also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in The
UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)
Dan's blog is at.http://danweinreb.org/blog/Lastentryis just 2
days ago, where he talks about learning French.
I feel sad that Dan is gone.
Xah

He wasn't just a student of Lisp, he helped create CL.

I don't think Xah Lee knew him personally.

Post by g***@hotmail.com
What kind of cancer was he suffering from?

Leukaemia, I believe.

Actually that might not be right. Sincere apologies.

g***@hotmail.com

2012-10-27 23:36:20 UTC

Permalink

Post by g***@hotmail.com

DanielWeinrebDied ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html
plain text version follows
------------------------------
DanielWeinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
Obituary athttp://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifes...
Danielfrequently use comp.lang.lisp. Since about 2007, i became
acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp
criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp
community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know
he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.
DanielWeinrebused Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder
of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.
He told me about how emacs keybinding started.
Source groups.google.com.
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: effective emacs
│ Effective Emacs
│
│ (Long term emacs productivity tips.)
│
│ Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
│
│ I have used emacs daily since 1998. Typically, i spent several
hours
│ inside emacs, everyday, for the past 10 years.
Same for me, except the year is 1977. Nobody has been using Emacs
longer than I have (I was one of the original beta-testers. I
refer
here to the original Emacs, written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.)
│ Emacs's default cursor moving shortcuts are “Ctrl+f”, “Ctrl+b”,
“Ctrl
│ +n”, “Ctrl+p”. The keys f, b, n, p are scattered around the
keyboard
│ and are not under the home row.
That's true. At the time Guy Steele put together the Emacs
default
key mappings, many people in the target user community (about 20
people at MIT!) were already using these key bindings. It would
have been hard to get the new Emacs bindings accepted by the
community if they differed for such basic commands. As you point
out, anyone using Emacs can very easily change this based on
their own ergonomic preferences.
│ GOOD
│ Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard
Let me put in a quick plug for my own favorite keyboard, which
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html
I like the feel of the keys very much. I agree with you
that it's important, and worth some effort, for everyone
to find a keyboard that they feel most comfortable with.
│ Problem and Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful.
I generally make few customizations to the key bindings, so
that when I work with another programmer, I can turn the
keyboard over to them and not cause confusion.
│ Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”.
I rarely use the menu bar. On the other hand, I was raised on an
Emacs that didn't have a menu bar, so I could be atypical. Using
the mouse to set point or set the region is great, though, and I
use that a lot.
Here's another piece of historical trivia. The Emacs keyboard
macro feature was inspired by a similar feature in the Stanford
DRAW system, an electrical CAD system widely-used by the AI lab
hardware hackers at the time. It was very powerful. But if you
made a mistake, it could really destroy your design, and so it
was a good idea to save to disk before running it. We had a
saying
for what happened if you forgot to save: "A moment of convenience,
a lifetime of regret." This predates the widespread use of "Undo"
functionality, surely one of the best ideas for user interfaces
ever invented.
-- Dan
Danielis a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics. Sometimes, you
can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: 〔Rebuttal to
Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI 2007-11-11
Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_stallmans_story.txt)〕
Danielalso wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's
EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was
the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed byDanielWeinreband Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the
same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It
would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which
itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into
Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the
second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.
(for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben
Wing.)
On occasion i criticized lisp's cons,Danielgently nudged me to give
detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp
Problems.
DanielWeinrebhimself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
Sucks.
One of the popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common
Lisp implementations. 〔Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be
broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web
Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my tone in the
criticism)
DanielWeinrebis also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in The
UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)
Dan's blog is at.http://danweinreb.org/blog/Lastentry is just 2
days ago, where he talks about learning French.
I feel sad that Dan is gone.
Xah

Its very sad to hear that he has passed away.
Perhaps, the best we can do to keep his legacy is to make sure all of
the surviving works of this student of lisp are put online and made
available to the coming generations.
Here are his publications that I cant find anywhere on the internet.
Xah, it seems that you might have a copy as you were a close friend
and found out about his passing before any of us. What kind of cancer
was he suffering from?
Lisp Machine Zwei
*Weinreb, Daniel L. & Moon, David (January 1979) The Lisp Machine
Manual.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. --
The user interface for Zwei.
ibid. (January 1979) A Real-Time Display-Oriented Editor for the Lisp
Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: S.B. Thesis, MIT Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department. -- How Zwei works
internally.
I would be very much interested in his BS thesis. Who has a copy of
it? You? Stallman? MIT CS department? MIT depository?
Maybe someone can pass this on to the Computer museum in Northern
California or Herbert Stoyan who did extensive work on the Lisp or the
Lucid people.
Regards,
Gnuist

g***@hotmail.com

2012-10-27 23:41:24 UTC

Permalink

It is strange that when MIT catalog is searched for Weinreb, only ONE
result appears, not even his B.S. Thesis title.

Full Record

Permalink for this record: http://library.mit.edu/item/000168706

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Author LinkWeinreb, Daniel.
Title Flavors, message passing in the Lisp Machine / Daniel
Weinreb, David Moon.
Shelf Access Find it in the library/Request item
Shelf Location Institute Archives - Noncirculating Collection 3 |
Q335.M41.A794 no.602

Published Cambridge, Mass. : Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1980.
Description 32 p. ; 28 cm.
Series LinkAI memo ; 602.
Format Book
Note Includes index.
Funding Information Advanced Research Projects Agency, Dept. of
Defense, ONR.: N00014-80-C-0505
Other Author LinkMoon, David.
Additional Title LinkThe Lisp Machine, Message passing in.
Local System Number 000168706

Post by g***@hotmail.com

DanielWeinrebDied ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html
plain text version follows
------------------------------
DanielWeinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
Obituary athttp://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifes...
Danielfrequently use comp.lang.lisp. Since about 2007, i became
acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp
criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp
community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know
he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.
DanielWeinrebused Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder
of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.
He told me about how emacs keybinding started.
Source groups.google.com.
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: effective emacs
│ Effective Emacs
│
│ (Long term emacs productivity tips.)
│
│ Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
│
│ I have used emacs daily since 1998. Typically, i spent several
hours
│ inside emacs, everyday, for the past 10 years.
Same for me, except the year is 1977. Nobody has been using Emacs
longer than I have (I was one of the original beta-testers. I
refer
here to the original Emacs, written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.)
│ Emacs's default cursor moving shortcuts are “Ctrl+f”, “Ctrl+b”,
“Ctrl
│ +n”, “Ctrl+p”. The keys f, b, n, p are scattered around the
keyboard
│ and are not under the home row.
That's true. At the time Guy Steele put together the Emacs
default
key mappings, many people in the target user community (about 20
people at MIT!) were already using these key bindings. It would
have been hard to get the new Emacs bindings accepted by the
community if they differed for such basic commands. As you point
out, anyone using Emacs can very easily change this based on
their own ergonomic preferences.
│ GOOD
│ Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard
Let me put in a quick plug for my own favorite keyboard, which
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html
I like the feel of the keys very much. I agree with you
that it's important, and worth some effort, for everyone
to find a keyboard that they feel most comfortable with.
│ Problem and Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful.
I generally make few customizations to the key bindings, so
that when I work with another programmer, I can turn the
keyboard over to them and not cause confusion.
│ Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”.
I rarely use the menu bar. On the other hand, I was raised on an
Emacs that didn't have a menu bar, so I could be atypical. Using
the mouse to set point or set the region is great, though, and I
use that a lot.
Here's another piece of historical trivia. The Emacs keyboard
macro feature was inspired by a similar feature in the Stanford
DRAW system, an electrical CAD system widely-used by the AI lab
hardware hackers at the time. It was very powerful. But if you
made a mistake, it could really destroy your design, and so it
was a good idea to save to disk before running it. We had a
saying
for what happened if you forgot to save: "A moment of convenience,
a lifetime of regret." This predates the widespread use of "Undo"
functionality, surely one of the best ideas for user interfaces
ever invented.
-- Dan
Danielis a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics. Sometimes, you
can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: 〔Rebuttal to
Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI 2007-11-11
Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_stallmans_story.txt)〕
Danielalso wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's
EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was
the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed byDanielWeinreband Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the
same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It
would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which
itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into
Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the
second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.
(for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben
Wing.)
On occasion i criticized lisp's cons,Danielgently nudged me to give
detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp
Problems.
DanielWeinrebhimself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
Sucks.
One of the popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common
Lisp implementations. 〔Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be
broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web
Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my tone in the
criticism)
DanielWeinrebis also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in The
UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)
Dan's blog is at.http://danweinreb.org/blog/Lastentryis just 2
days ago, where he talks about learning French.
I feel sad that Dan is gone.
Xah

Its very sad to hear that he has passed away.
Perhaps, the best we can do to keep his legacy is to make sure all of
the surviving works of this student of lisp are put online and made
available to the coming generations.
Here are his publications that I cant find anywhere on the internet.
Xah, it seems that you might have a copy as you were a close friend
and found out about his passing before any of us. What kind of cancer
was he suffering from?
Lisp Machine Zwei
*Weinreb, Daniel L. & Moon, David (January 1979) The Lisp Machine
Manual.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. --
The user interface for Zwei.
ibid. (January 1979) A Real-Time Display-Oriented Editor for the Lisp
Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: S.B. Thesis, MIT Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department. -- How Zwei works
internally.
I would be very much interested in his BS thesis. Who has a copy of
it? You? Stallman? MIT CS department? MIT depository?
Maybe someone can pass this on to the Computer museum in Northern
California or Herbert Stoyan who did extensive work on the Lisp or the
Lucid people.
Regards,
Gnuist

Rivka Miller

2012-11-03 22:13:09 UTC

Permalink

Post by g***@hotmail.com

DanielWeinrebDied ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html
plain text version follows
------------------------------
DanielWeinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
Obituary athttp://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifes...
Danielfrequently use comp.lang.lisp. Since about 2007, i became
acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp
criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp
community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know
he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.
DanielWeinrebused Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder
of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.
He told me about how emacs keybinding started.
Source groups.google.com.
User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs,comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: effective emacs
│ Effective Emacs
│
│ (Long term emacs productivity tips.)
│
│ Xah Lee, 2008-05-29
│
│ I have used emacs daily since 1998. Typically, i spent several
hours
│ inside emacs, everyday, for the past 10 years.
Same for me, except the year is 1977. Nobody has been using Emacs
longer than I have (I was one of the original beta-testers. I
refer
here to the original Emacs, written in ITS TECO for the DEC 10.)
│ Emacs's default cursor moving shortcuts are “Ctrl+f”, “Ctrl+b”,
“Ctrl
│ +n”, “Ctrl+p”. The keys f, b, n, p are scattered around the
keyboard
│ and are not under the home row.
That's true. At the time Guy Steele put together the Emacs
default
key mappings, many people in the target user community (about 20
people at MIT!) were already using these key bindings. It would
have been hard to get the new Emacs bindings accepted by the
community if they differed for such basic commands. As you point
out, anyone using Emacs can very easily change this based on
their own ergonomic preferences.
│ GOOD
│ Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard
Let me put in a quick plug for my own favorite keyboard, which
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/customizer.html
I like the feel of the keys very much. I agree with you
that it's important, and worth some effort, for everyone
to find a keyboard that they feel most comfortable with.
│ Problem and Why Emacs's Keyboard Shortcuts Are Painful.
I generally make few customizations to the key bindings, so
that when I work with another programmer, I can turn the
keyboard over to them and not cause confusion.
│ Steve advices users to “Lose the UI”.
I rarely use the menu bar. On the other hand, I was raised on an
Emacs that didn't have a menu bar, so I could be atypical. Using
the mouse to set point or set the region is great, though, and I
use that a lot.
Here's another piece of historical trivia. The Emacs keyboard
macro feature was inspired by a similar feature in the Stanford
DRAW system, an electrical CAD system widely-used by the AI lab
hardware hackers at the time. It was very powerful. But if you
made a mistake, it could really destroy your design, and so it
was a good idea to save to disk before running it. We had a
saying
for what happened if you forgot to save: "A moment of convenience,
a lifetime of regret." This predates the widespread use of "Undo"
functionality, surely one of the best ideas for user interfaces
ever invented.
-- Dan
Danielis a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics. Sometimes, you
can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: 〔Rebuttal to
Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI 2007-11-11
Daniel_Weinreb_rebuttal_to_stallmans_story.txt)〕
Danielalso wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's
EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was
the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed byDanielWeinreband Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the
same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It
would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which
itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into
Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the
second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.
(for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben
Wing.)
On occasion i criticized lisp's cons,Danielgently nudged me to give
detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp
Problems.
DanielWeinrebhimself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
Sucks.
One of the popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common
Lisp implementations. 〔Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey
When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be
broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web
Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my tone in the
criticism)
DanielWeinrebis also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in The
UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)
Dan's blog is at.http://danweinreb.org/blog/Lastentry is just 2
days ago, where he talks about learning French.
I feel sad that Dan is gone.
Xah

Its very sad to hear that he has passed away.
Perhaps, the best we can do to keep his legacy is to make sure all of
the surviving works of this student of lisp are put online and made
available to the coming generations.
Here are his publications that I cant find anywhere on the internet.
Xah, it seems that you might have a copy as you were a close friend
and found out about his passing before any of us. What kind of cancer
was he suffering from?
Lisp Machine Zwei
*Weinreb, Daniel L. & Moon, David (January 1979) The Lisp Machine
Manual.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. --
The user interface for Zwei.
ibid. (January 1979) A Real-Time Display-Oriented Editor for the Lisp
Machine. Cambridge, Massachusetts: S.B. Thesis, MIT Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department. -- How Zwei works
internally.
I would be very much interested in his BS thesis. Who has a copy of
it? You? Stallman? MIT CS department? MIT depository?

The following results of google search suggest a Ph.D. dissertation.

[TeX]
LaTeX Original - lists.gnu....
lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gcl-devel/2004-05/textRBw9z4nJ0.tex
File Format: TeX/LaTeX - View as HTML
Dr. Daniel Weinreb at Symbolics answered most of our questions about
the language specification. He also sent us the definition of
rationalize written by Dr.

Kyoto Common Lisp Report Taiichi Yuasa and Masami Hagiya ...
lists.gnu.org/archive/html/gcl-devel/2004-05/txt5jNdjAdqnL.txt
Dr. Daniel Weinreb at Symbolics answered most of our questions about
the language specification. He also sent us the definition of r a t i
o n a l i z e written by ...

Report
www.mat.uc.pt/~pedro/cientificos/OBJ/Tape-obj3/kcl/doc/report
... are indebted to Dr. Richard Gabriel at Stanford University. Dr.
Daniel Weinreb at Symbolics solved most of our questions about the
language specification.

Xah Lee

2012-11-06 23:55:27 UTC

Permalink

locating Daniel Weinrebdied's published works.

Post by g***@hotmail.com

Daniel Weinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).

I don't know Daniel Weinrebdied well. We exchanged a couple private
email, that's all.

If you are interested in contacting people who knew him, you can
follow these links:

http://lispm.dyndns.org/dlw
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4490892
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=159710898#fbLoggedOut
http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/09/07/dan-weinreb-boston-computer-geek-community-figure-dies-of-cancer/

and check the comments for leads. Oh, the best is probably Daniel's
blog http://danweinreb.org/blog/ . There you'll find many comments
from people who knew him, or his co-workers thru the years. They might
point you to where to find Daniel's publications.

Xah

Barry Margolin

2012-11-07 16:43:45 UTC

Permalink

In article

Post by Xah Lee
locating Daniel Weinrebdied's published works.

Post by g***@hotmail.com

Daniel Weinrebdied today. Cancer. Aged 53. (â1959 ~ 2012-09-07).

I don't know Daniel Weinrebdied well. We exchanged a couple private
email, that's all.

You apparently don't even know his name well. It doesn't end with
"died", that was just a typo in the earlier message.

--
Barry Margolin, ***@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

2012-11-07 02:21:10 UTC

Permalink

Post by Xah Lee
Daniel Weinreb Died ((1959 ~ 2012) Lisp Programer)
http://ergoemacs.org/misc/Daniel_Weinreb_died.html
plain text version follows
------------------------------
Daniel Weinreb died today. Cancer. Aged 53. (≈1959 ~ 2012-09-07).
Obituary at http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=159710898

Here's a humorous response he made to Kenny Tilton:

From: Daniel Weinreb <***@alum.mit.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: is oo oversold?
Lines: 46
Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:49:33 GMT

Ken Tilton wrote:
...
...

Post by Xah Lee
Richard Gabriel denounced OO as the cause of the dot bomb crash during
an ILC keynote. Thought you should know.
kxo

Richard Gabriel just devoted the most recent year of his life
to being the program chair of the Object-Oriented Programming,
Systems, Languages, and Applications conference. If he doesn't
believe in object-oriented stuff, I'm a monkey's uncle.

2012-11-07 19:50:26 UTC

Permalink

Post by Xah Lee
Daniel Weinreb himself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp
Sucks.

Dan Weinreb, one of the designers of Common Lisp:

... the problem with LOOP was that it turned out to be hard to
predict what it would do, when you started using a lot of
different facets of LOOP all together. This is a serious problem
since the whole idea of LOOP was to let you use many facets
together; if you're not doing that, LOOP is overkill.

Daniel Weinreb, 24 Feb 2003:

Having separate "value cells" and "function cells" (to use
the "street language" way of saying it) was one of the most
unfortunate issues. We did not want to break pre-existing
programs that had a global variable named "foo" and a global
function named "foo" that were distinct. We at Symbolics
were forced to insist on this, in the face of everyone's
knowing that it was not what we would have done absent
compatibility constraints. It's hard for me to remember all
the specific things like this, but if we had had fewer
compatibility issues, I think it would have come out looking
more like Scheme in general.

Daniel Weinreb, 28 Feb 2003:

Lisp2 means that all kinds of language primitives have to
exist in two versions, or be parameterizable as to whether
they are talking about the value cell or function cell. It
makes the language bigger, and that's bad in and of itself.