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So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich

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Re: So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich

#4
As the author of Capistrano, we leant on Rake a great deal in the new version, Jim was amazing in helping us through some of the weirder parts of the integration, and always happy to discuss the pros and cons of our planned approaches. I hope that the community can select someone to replace him. He's done great work for the community.

Re: So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich

#8
Just realised how often when working on some code I will try to contact the original author based on git blame... but in the future, a lot of those people won't be around anymore. I think we usually take for granted that people working on the same project will be here - but in a couple of years "anyone who worked on this module still alive?" may be depressingly more common. Not even from the development perspective, but working on the same thing as someone who's not alive anymore. Apart from long-term or famous construction projects, I can't think of many non-art places where the author is preserved in the history so permanently as in a source version control.

Re: So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich

#9
Jim was a silent star of the Ruby community. Some newer Rubyists might not see how important his work on Rake was on Rubys road from a toy language to a serious development environment. Also, Rake was (to my knowledge) one of the first libraries that aggressively leaned on Rubys block syntax for writing DSLs.

On top of that, he was well known for his talks and ability to explain things.

A recommended read: an early statement on Ruby on the C2 Wiki (scroll down to "User stories")

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RubyLanguage

Re: So very sad to hear about the passing of Ruby legend Jim Weirich

#10
That is really sad news.

Jim Weirich was a real gem. Friendly, approachable and chatty, he didn't have that aloofness so unfortunately common to some "personalities" in the ruby commmunity. In the last couple of years he had been interested in controlling drones with ruby, regularly posting articles on the Neo blog and speaking about it at conferences. It was my great pleasure to spend an hour or so with him in Singapore last year just chatting about drones, his argus control library, and applications present and future - he was a genuinely interested, interesting, friendly man with a fantastic, giving spirit.

He was one of the founding fathers of what I like to think of as the "real" ruby community and will be sorely missed.

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