Does anyone else find it strange that there’s rarely any mention of cause of death in Wikipedia? Is it uncouth to ask how someone passed away?
Larry Tesler Has Died
101–110 of 163 posts
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#102Tesler spent 17 years at Apple, rising to chief scientist.
He went on to establish an education startup and do stints in user-experience technology at Amazon and Yahoo.
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#103Does anyone else find it strange that there’s rarely any mention of cause of death in Wikipedia? Is it uncouth to ask how someone passed away?
Sometimes it's mentioned, sometimes the family prefers privacy. It's not uncouth to ask, but it's good to respect that privacy if the family does not share the cause of death.
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#104rest in peace
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#105What
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
TECO from the 1960's had more than cut and paste, multiple storage slots called "q registers" (they were named with letters) into which you could put text from the main buffer, and from which you could retrieve it back. Text regions in the buffer were referred to by numeric ranges, some number of characters forward or back relative to the current cursor position, with additional notions such as "here to beginning/end…
Ah! That's why vi's letter-named registers are written to with the q command.
I was confused by the ‘q’ command in vi, so I did quick testing (in nvi(1)) and scanned vim cheat sheets. I still don’t know what ‘q’ does in the named buffer context - help?
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#107Larry 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 nee…
> doing what he encouraged
Did he encourage you do be you ?
Are you You because of him, maybe not, because its impossible to grade.
But here you are paying respect to a man that you met, so I would say: he had an impact on you. Even at that moment.
We could play highschool politics and as what you learnt from him.
But from your message it's clear.
I never met him personally, but I certainly felt his impact.
RIP
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#108I was in college, and attended a career fair for Amazon back in 2002. I was not in my last year so I really went just for free food. It was quite sparse, and after a while one guy with a friendly smile just walked up to me and said "Hi, I'm Larry". We talked a little bit about my background, about Amazon and opportunities there. I felt like I was a hotshot at the time, and quite frankly didn't. Only after I went back to my dorm and looked him up did I realize who I was talking to.
He was super humble, super nice. I acted like a jerk, thinking I was hot stuff and everybody was there to court me and was there just for free pizza. Despite being infinitely more accomplished than I could ever be, he was nice, engaging and never treated me in kind.
Every so often I think back to that time and kick myself at the lost opportunity to have a conversation with one of the legends of Silicon Valley.
Thank you Larry.
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#109I was just eating lunch across the street from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino when I read the news. The John Sculley era of Apple has received a lot of criticism. With that being said, one of the aspects of this era that I'm most impressed with is the work that came out of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. During this time period Apple was serious about advancing the state of research in the areas of programming…
Larry was influential in the development and the missions of both ATG and the Human Interface Group, both of which are now gone now. He believed in conducting practical experiments with users and collecting objective measurements of how well UI worked. He wanted to find general principles that could be used to make all software better for everyone. Steve Jobs killed both ATG and HIG. I think your point about times be…
"he wasted no time in killing them and replacing them with himself."
ooh ouch that's a sharp, and understated, line!
Re: Larry Tesler Has Died
#110RIP Larry Tesler.
I rather feel a worm for not being aware of him till today. Nevertheless, hearing the many personal stories here on HN of his work, humility and graciousness, make me thankful for him and his tribe that have made the software profession so much more richer.