Larry Tesler Has Died

Some of us actually did know him. I did, albeit not as well as others here, and I see no harm and much good in people celebrating his accomplishments in his chosen career.

Douglas Engelbart demonstrated copy/paste with a mouse in 1968 [1], however I'm not sure what he called the process. It was also very much an experimental system and not something for sale.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY

Larry kindly traded letters with me when I was a young man attempting to learn programming via Object Pascal. Eventually, my mom made me write him a check for all the postage he had spent. In addition to sending me at least two letters a week for just around a decade, he shipped me dozens of books and manuals. One year for the holidays, someone sent me 4 large FedEx boxes filled with networking gear I desperately needed for a “M”MORPG game I was building. The return label read “53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50”. In the game, players were elves scrambling to defeat a corrupted workshop. The final boss was S̶a̶t̶a̶n̶ Santa himself.

It was only when I was older that I appreciated that he had probably sent me thousands of dollars worth of gear (and not in 2020 dollars!) in addition to the invaluable advice he provided, sometimes (frankly, often) unsolicited but always direct and always thought provoking.

While I never did become an extremely competent commercial developer, to this day I enjoy programming for programming’s own sake. Larry’s push for me to fix my own headaches, rather than simply giving me a metaphorical aspirin, resulted in my development of solutions for small hobby problems that it appeared often only myself and perhaps a few others shared.

As it turns out, in spite of (or thanks to) my niche interests, my curiosity and the method of targeted problem solving Larry fostered set me on a path I remain on today. Frankly, his contributions helped mold me as a man more than those of any other mentor of mine; that is absolutely meant as a compliment to his prescient pedagogy, rather than a slight at my life’s many other wonderful influences.

I’ve sold a few businesses thanks to Larry’s problem solving approach. The rest I founded are running profitably - and somehow I’ve never lost an investor money. My customers have always, above all else, been happy because they had their problems fixed. (Or, perhaps thanks to his influence, their happiness stemmed from my teams simply providing them with the tools they needed to solve their own problems!)

And because I followed Larry’s personal advice, I have been able to spend every day for nearly two decades doing what he encouraged and what has consistently engaged me: finding, isolating and destroying problems.

Thank you for everything.

You don't necessarily need to know someone personally to feel a sense of loss. You can feel a "bond" with with someone based on all sorts of things: being members of a common community, sharing a common occupation, etc., etc.

To illustrate one case that hits close to home for me... when I think about the 343 firefighters who were killed on 9/11, I find it difficult not to tear up at times. Even though I never met any of them, and couldn't tell you any of their names. But we shared a common bond, by virtue of being firefighters. My sense of loss at their death is rooted in how deeply I admire all of them for the bravery and courage they displayed on that day, putting their lives on the line in the name of saving others. Do I feel that as strongly as if I had been the literal biological sibling of one them? Possibly not, but they were still my brothers, and the sense of loss is still real.

Also here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22367558