Lisp Programer Daniel Weinreb Died (1959 to 2012)

By Xah Lee. Date: . Last updated: .

Daniel Weinreb died today. Cancer. Aged 53. (1959 to 2012-09-07).

Daniel L Weinreb Obituary 9YZhq
Daniel L Weinreb Obituary, from The Boston Globe. http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=159710898

The first news post that broke the story seems to be

Daniel L Weinreb died 2012-09-07 869fe
[Dan Weinreb, Boston Computer Geek, Community Figure, Dies of Cancer By Robert Buderi. At http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2012/09/07/dan-weinreb-boston-computer-geek-community-figure-dies-of-cancer/ , accessed on 2012-09-08 ]
Dan Weinreb
Dan Weinreb

Daniel sometimes posts in comp.lang.lisp newsgroup. Since about 2007, i became acquainted with him, because he responded to some of my lisp criticisms. Subsequently i learned of his status in the lisp community. Later have exchanged a couple email with him. I didn't know he had cancer. Don't think he ever blogged about his illness.

Daniel Weinreb used Emacs before Richard Stallman, and is a co-founder of Symbolics, a lisp company during 1980s.

He told me about how emacs keybinding started. [see Daniel Weinreb on Emacs Keybinding]

(his fav keyboard is Unicomp, which uses IBM's Modle M's buckling spring key switch mechanism. [see Unicomp Keyboard])

Daniel is a co-founder of the lisp company Symbolics (the first Lisp Machine company.). Sometimes, you can see he speaks out on lisp history. Here's one: [Rebuttal to Stallman's Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI By Daniel Weinreb. At http://danweinreb.org/blog/rebuttal-to-stallmans-story-about-the-formation-of-symbolics-and-lmi]

(local copy History of LISP, Emacs, Symbolics (Daniel Weinreb Rebut Richard Stallman) )

Daniel also wrote a version of emacs. EINE (EINE Is Not Emacs). Here's quote from Wikipedia:

EINE (a recursive acronym standing for “EINE Is Not Emacs”) was the Emacs text editor for Lisp machines. It was developed by Daniel Weinreb and Mike McMahon in the late 1970s, with a command set the same as the original Emacs written in TECO by Richard Stallman. It would later be developed into ZWEI ( “ZWEI Was Eine Initially”), which itself would eventually become Symbolics' Zmacs (integrated into Symbolics' development for their Lisp machines, Genera). It was the second Emacs written, and the first to be written in Lisp.

[Wikipedia EINE]

(for some emacs history, see: GNU Emacs and XEmacs Schism, by Ben Wing.)

On occasion i criticized lisp's cons, Daniel gently nudged me to give detail. See: Programing Language: A Ruby Illustration of Lisp Problems • Lisp List Problem.

Daniel Weinreb himself have criticized Common Lisp. See: Common Lisp Sucks. A more popular one is on Common Lisp's “loop”, mirrored on Paul Graham's site at [Dan Weinreb: Loop By Dan Weinreb. At http://paulgraham.com/loop.html , accessed on 2012-09-08 ].

Another popular article Dan has written is a comparison of Common Lisp implementations. [Common Lisp Implementations: A Survey By Daniel Weinreb. At http://common-lisp.net/~dlw/LispSurvey.html , accessed on 2012-09-08 ] (When he announced that on comp.lang.lisp, i recommended the page be broken to sub-pages, and other formatting issues. See: Monolithic Web Pages. He didn't take it to heart. (and i regret my rashness in putting forward my opinion))

Daniel Weinreb is also mentioned in the acknowledgement section in the infamous UNIX-HATERS Handbook. (see the PDF file at The Unix Pestilence.)

Dan's blog is at http://danweinreb.org/blog/. Last entry is about a year ago, where he talks about learning French. (i think he was diagnosed with cancer a year ago.)

In the popular essay Worse Is Better, the MIT guy in the story, is Daniel Weinreb. See: Lisp Celebrities and Computing History from Worse Is Better.

I feel sad that Dan is gone.

Other's pages on Dan's passing: