Ralph E. Griswold, designer/developer of the Snobol and Icon programming languages, died on October 4, 2006. Ehud Lamm writes in his obituary:

Griswold's life work was in the area of non-numerical computing.[*] Griswold was the primary designer of series of string-manipulation languages (Icon was preceded by SL5 which was preceded by SNOBOL4). For many years strings were perhaps the most important and the most widely misunderstood data type in programming languages (perhaps now being displaced by XML trees). Griswold, though a university researcher for many years, should be considered firstly as a programming language innovator and inventor, and not an academic researcher in the usual sense of the word. Griswold, like the late Kenneth Iverson, invented and championed programming language constructs, and his contributions were among those that led the way to programming as currently understood. He was truly one of the founding figures of the field of programming language design.

As others have noted, computer science has always been a discipline where the founders were still around. This is changing.

Obituaries:

• University of Arizona
• Peter H. Salus
• Ehud Lamm

[via Lambda the Ultimate]

NSIT Lounge released a inspiring interview with Richard P. Feynman on Google Video. Feynman talks about his childhood, his first encounter with calculus reading "Calculus for the Practical Man" at age thirteen, how they build the Bomb in Los Alamos, how they threw a party while Hiroshima was burning, how a seemingly simple problem of rotating bodies led to to quantum electrodynamics. Here's Feynman commenting on the Nobel prize he received:

I don't like honours. I appreciate it for the work that I did and for people who appreciate it and I notice when other phycicists use my work. I don't need anything else. I don't think there's any sense to anything else.I don't see that it makes any point, that someone in the Swedish academy decides that this work is nobel enough to receive a prize. I've already got the price! The prize is the pleasure of finding the thing out, the kick in the discovery, the observation of the people who use it. Those are the real things! The honours are unreal to me. I don't believe in honours.

Some 15 years ago, when I was still studying physics in Tuebingen, my friend Klaus-Peter Zauner showed me the game Mutabor invented by Karsten W. Theis. I got totally hooked. Karsten captured the spirit of Meta Chess, mentioned in the book Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter in a much simpler game. It is very intriguing to play a game where the rules change all the time. Feels like a Lisp REPL.

Other games with changing rules: Lemma, Proteus, Nomic.

Jonathan S. Shapiro, who is a really smart guy and the primary architect and developer of the EROS operating system, wrote a painful article about his experiences with C++. After reading it I'm again nonplussed why he isn't using Common Lisp to develop OpenCM and EROS. Seems like the Right Thing to do for his area of work.

Every programming language has its share of complexities. C++ is certainly no exception. In fact, because C++ carries a heavy burden of legacy compatibility requirements with C, it may have (arguably) more than its share. This article describes a problem that I ran into while implementing the latest version of the OpenCM system that cost me several months and nearly led me to abandon a design path in a detrimental way.

It's been long overdue and it finally happened last week: Alan Kay received the 2003 Turing Award. [1] [2]