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• @kentpitman@climatejustice.social 2026-10-15 22:31

  @vnikolov@ieji.de @amoroso@oldbytes.space Ha, interesting point, though it was not a remark about me now, just a historical remembrance. If I ever was, I am not so much now worried about "being remembered", just doing something respectable that had an impact. :) As I recall, I wasn't exactly worried, just conscious that it was not really dignified. Like how inventing the flush toilet probably didn't get the heroic praise it should have. Still, I take your point, and it's kind of you to think it through that way. It seems true that people these days do seem to respect the work, and that makes me pleased whether or not my name is on it because I feel like the ideas won't get lost, which was actually my clear original goal. My contribution, after all, was really not the coming up with most of the ideas, which evolved from New Error System (NES) and the Multics PL/1 language. The first contribution I made, such as it is, was to notice that these ideas would die with the Lisp Machine (which to some degree also involved accepting that the Lisp Machine might itself not survive, a sadness in itself, even if it survives in emulators now, and are weirdly faster in modern emulation than they ever were in then-hardware), and to try to come up with a place to re-plant the ideas that would be more enduring. The second contribution was to help shape some of the individual constructs. For example, I nudged things here and there toward the idea of restarts being active/imperative transfers of control, not passive return of a keyword that one hoped the caller would turn into a transfer. And perhaps there was a third which was just to manage the sub-consensus process of coming up with a design at all [0], and which included creating and circulating the sample implementation [1] and doing some promotion/cheerleading to get vendors to use it. The downstream effect was an unsynchronized experimentation with and ultimate adoption of these ideas into individual implementations over a period of months or years prior to the formal standard being adopted, so that people could feel comfortable that it was the right thing. (And note, too, that even Revision 18, the proposal adopted wholesale into the language itself, was subsequently modified through the cleanup process, so did not represent the final word. There was some evolution prior to freezing things based on that interim use.) Back to the original point, though .. In my personal attention, being remembered per se is not the important thing. It matters to have a downstream improvement on quality of life, so Gabriel's benchmarks did that whether his name is associated with that effect or not. Names ARE useful to remember sometimes just as a tag to group concepts. For example, I once saw a headline saying that historians had discovered that Shakespeare might not be who we think, and I thought "The guy who wrote the Shakespearean plays was not Shakespeare?" That isn't what they meant, of course. They just imagined that in my brain was metadata about Shakespeare, when really it was just a folder name and it was as if they were saying that the folder whose name I could clearly see in my file directory was not the folder that would contain those plays. Some people might want to know about Shakespeare's life. For myself, it's been enough for me to know that he knew about ours, i.e., that he understood human nature. (I guess one might want to study how he got to there. Just not something I ever pursued.) The name, in other words, CAN just be grouping. So if someone wants to group things I did by my name, that might be a clearer way to associate my writings (prose, poetry, and code) on philosophy, social justice, climate change, and love & relationships than trying to come up with a conceptual category. Recent conversations I've had with virtual assistants have led them to spontaneously volunteer, by the way, that they observe a conceptual through-line of consistent modeling that I do across all of those named topics, so it's not as odd a group as it sounds, just tough to name. :) And I am not the first to suggest that sometimes history is better understood by tracing the actions of individuals than the relationships of topics. So it's not madness to remember people by name, I just don't think it needs to be done for vanity, because that's a useless pursuit. I played arcade video games when I was in college and just after. It was fun to get onto the high score board, but someone regularly unplugged the machine and my name was wiped. That's my model of history. It's not that it's not fun to be on the board, but such glory is fleeting. Maybe my concern about Climate Change follows from this, too, though. I'd like humanity not to get unplugged quite so quickly as we seem intent on doing. [0] https://nhplace.com/kent/CL/Revision-18.txt [1] https://nhplace.com/kent/CL/Revision-18.lisp.txt

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