It always bugged me that Scott never got a proper send-off. He’s been gone for a year now. He did so much work, but didn’t even get a thank-you-goodbye.
But it’s not my place to make a fuss about it. I just wish I knew what ended up happening to him. (If you’re reading this, Scott, I hope you’ve been well!)
We spent a few years doing some enjoyable work together on Lumen, a Lisp for JS and Lua. I’m not sure we were friends, but it was interesting to get to know him, especially before he was an HN mod.
I wish I didn’t have a plane to catch in 30 minutes, otherwise I’d write up all the things I learned from working with him. But he was one of the most effective hackers I’ve ever seen. Crucially, in the communication department. If you had a question, Scott had an answer, or at least a lead, often within 5 minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since.
He was not merely a fan of simplicity, but seemed to shun complexity the way outer space shuns air. One of the finest examples of his work is, in my opinion, a library he wrote for Lumen called Motor: https://github.com/sctb/motor
To this day, any one of you can open any file in that repo and understand exactly what it’s doing at a glance. I challenge you to find anything surprising or confusing.
I don’t understand why he seemed to vanish into thin air a year ago, but the explanation is probably mundane. He once shared some wonderful music he made, so I like to imagine he went off to make music in some quiet mountain town or something.