[Pharo-project] [squeak-dev] In Memory of Andreas Raab

Stéphane Ducasse stephane.ducasse at inria.fr
Tue Jan 15 13:32:54 UTC 2013


Hi goran

You are right! This is a sad day. 
We got a friend that nearly died last year and young member of my family that died suddenly recently. 
This is why we should have fun and also think that life is fragile.
This is why I decided to be in positive energy, to create good energy around me and enjoy life and coding.

Stef

> Dear friends in both Squeak and Pharo communities,
> 
> I am stunned but felt I just had to write something on this day and I am CCing Pharo because in the end we are all the same community in my book.
> 
> Andreas was so young and had just started the next chapter of his life together with Kathleen. Now, there are other people in this community who knew Andreas much better than I did, but I still want to write something, especially perhaps to you who aren't that familiar with Andreas and all the work he has done for us.
> 
> Andreas was *exceptionally* bright and above all perhaps the single most *productive* Squeaker in our community - we use lots of his code every day. In a Squeak 4.4 image there are 6382 methods with his developer initials currently on them touching in total almost a thousand classes. And this is more than *double* the amount of methods as the second developer on that list. And since this is just based on the latest version of the method, his legacy is even bigger in reality.
> 
> "Top thirty method touchers"
> ((CompiledMethod allInstances collect: [:m |
> 	m timeStamp readStream upTo: Character space])
> 		asBag sortedCounts first: 30)
> 
> "Classes touched by Andreas"
> (CompiledMethod allInstances select: [:m |
> 	(m timeStamp readStream upTo: Character space) = 'ar']
> 		thenCollect: [:m | m methodClass])
> 		 	asSet
> 
> And even in Pharo 1.4 his mark is still there with almost 3000 methods touching almost 400 classes, this places him at *fourth* place.
> 
> And of course he wrote the Windows VM and was an instrumental developer of Croquet/Teleplace and much, much, *much* more.
> 
> Now, we have a few VM developers who are very good at those parts. And we have developers who are very good at selected areas of the image level. But people like Andreas who work on *all* levels of Squeak, from the VM and all the way up to 3D and stuff like Croquet... well, we don't have many and at the moment I am not sure I can think of anyone with the same span as Andreas had.
> 
> I only met him a few times, at OOPSLA I think and once he visited Stockholm and we had some time hacking and talking about Squeak and how to grow the community and so on. He cared quite a lot about the community, perhaps more than most people thought.
> 
> Two years ago Andreas contacted me for some contract work for Teleplace and he was as always very sharp, friendly and helpful in getting me up to speed and being involved although I was sitting here in Stockholm. We had some late night Skype sessions digging deep together in odd network protocols and it was in the middle of one such session, about 2 years ago that I asked him:
> 
> 	Me: And hey, Eliot gossiped that you ... met someone? :)
> 	Andreas: Yes, indeed. Madly in love as they say :-)
> 
> Life is just not fair. This is a very sad day.
> 
> Göran
> 
> 



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