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Larry Tesler Has Died

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111–120 of 163 posts

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#111

Larry was a great thinker. I got to discuss "vi vs. emacs" at one of the Fellows induction ceremonies held at the Computer History Museum. He could easily articulate counter cases and keep the discussion both productive and quite civil! I first met him while I was visiting my wife at her office in Xerox Business Systems (XBS). He came over to discuss some suggestions to improve the protocol she was working on. I thou…

Only tangentially related but I loved reading this interview with him from Computer History Museum https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

It’s not the same impact as the video interview in Designing for Interactions but covers a lot of ground from Larry Tesler’s perspective.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#112

This breaks my heart. I used to work next to Larry—literally sat next to him—on Yahoo’s central design team. We were in frequent meetings together, but didn’t talk one-on-one often. One evening commuting from work, during one of many Caltrain failures, he noticed me as I waited outside the train and offered me a ride home. I remember sitting nervously in the car, a bit awestruck, and I finally got up the courage to a…

To clarify, as the dialogue could be construed otherwise, Larry was actually very humble. While he was not as famous as he should have been, he had so much influence on the industry, it could easily go to your head. He was very approachable and helpful, and overall a generous and kind person. Will be sorely missed.

It’s ok, I think anyone would realise that the fact he gave you a lift meant he was a pretty nice guy. I really enjoyed reading your story. I’m sorry you lost a friend.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#113
post #106
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Recording macros, I think.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#114
One of the strangest moments in my career was Larry asking me for career advice when we were both at Yahoo; I think because I had been an IC for really long time and had figured out how to leverage that into strategic positions. Great man with incredible accomplishments.

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#115
post #113
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Recording macros, I think.

Looks like you’re correct![0]

In nvi, I just key my commands on a scratch line (testing occasionally), then:

   “xyy
to load the whole line (yy) into buffer ‘x’ (“x). Execution (@x) thereafter looks ~same.

[0] https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Macros

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, I was wondering how you managed to reverse the hash and then had a facepalm moment.

I still don’t get it.

python, decoding and encoding the message

a="53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50"

"".join([chr(int(a[i:(i+2)],16)) for i in range(0,len(a),2)])

=> 'SANTA AND HIS WORKSHOP'

a = 'SANTA AND HIS WORKSHOP'

"".join([hex(ord(c)) for c in a]).replace('0x','')

=> '53414e544120414e442048495320574f524b53484f50'

Re: Larry Tesler Has Died

#117
I knew Larry Tesler as a colleague, friend, member of my research group, manager, etc. for more than 50 years, almost as long as I knew Bert Sutherland.

There is an excellent obit for Larry at: https://gizmodo.com/larry-tessler-modeless-computing-advocat...

... and I expect another one from John Markoff -- who was a friend of his -- in the NYTimes.

In many ways, Larry did too many interesting things and had so much influence in too many areas for there to be any chance to characterize him technically. In short, he was a superb wide-spectrum(real) computer scientist who was also a very talented and skilled programmer.

His passing was sudden and unexpected, and I may return later to this note to add more details of his rich career.

For now, I remember him as great to work with in all aspects of his life. He was a great guy, and perhaps that sums him up as best as can be.

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