the passing of IBM's David N. Smith

John Maloney jmaloney at media.mit.edu
Tue Apr 20 17:56:48 UTC 2004


I've also known Dave ("N") Smith for at least 15 years. He was
one of my Smalltalk heros when I was first learning Smalltalk.
I interviewed with him when I was coming out of graduate school
(IBM's Smalltalk was still a skunk-works project at the time). He
had a curious, creative, and sometimes playful approach to programming
that inspired me: he used the computer as a tool to help people
think better.

He was one of earliest members of the Squeak community and made
quite a few contributions. In addition to those already mentioned by
Sam, he gave us a good, fast implementation of the Park-Miller random
number generator and I seem to recall that he also made major contributions
to Floats.

I'm sorry he's no longer with us.

Sam, thanks for passing the word to the Squeak list.

	-- John


At 12:27 PM -0400 4/20/04, Sam Adams wrote:
> 
>David N. Smith, one of IBM's first Smalltalkers, passed away Tuesday, April 13, 2004. Dave was an ardent supporter of Smalltalk from the its origins at PARC through IBM's own versions.  He was the author of several books, including Concepts of Object-Oriented Programming, and IBM Smalltalk: The Language. 
>For the last several years he was a dedicated Squeaker and a frequent contributor of high quality code, including significant improvements to the Number classes, early morphic drag and drop, and the ever popular wandering blob demo. 
>Dave was a deep thinker, a dedicated researcher, a creative and supportive co-worker, and a good friend. 
>We'll miss him. 
>Expressions of sympathy may be sent to ssadams at us.ibm.com and I will forward them to Dave's family. 
>Those who frequent other Smalltalk-related lists may repost this message there. 
>Please note that this is David N. Smith of IBM, *not* David Smith of Virtus and Croquet fame. 
> Sam S. Adams, IBM Distinguished Engineer, IBM Research tie line 444-0736, outside 919-254-0736, email: ssadams at us.ibm.com <<Hebrews 11:6, Proverbs 3:5-6, Romans 1:16-17, I Corinthians 1:10>>  






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