W. Richard Stevens Passes On

Tybstar writes "Looks like W. Richard Stevens has passed on, according to this Deja article. The poster of that article is listed in the credits of UNIX Network Programming, and the book mentions his place of work. " Thanks to mpearce, we have a link to an obituary. It's weird to think that just yesterday I almost bought one of his books...

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From his Preface (sort of a Eulogy)

[craw]

When somebody passes away, you should either speak of the good things about him/her, or otherwise keep your mouth shut. With that in mind, I would like to quote from his last book. This was in the preface.

I produced camera-ready copy of the book (PostScript), which was then typeset for the final book. The formatting system used was James Clark's wonderful groff package, on a SparcStation running Solaris 2.6. (Reports of troff's death are greatly exagerated.) I typed in all 138,897 words using the vi editor, created the 72 illustrations using the gpic program (using many of Gary Wright's macros), produced the 35 tables using the gtbl program, performed all the indexing (using a set of awk scripts written by Jon Bentley and Brian Kernighan), and did the final page layout. Dave Hanson's loom program, the GNU indent program, and some scripts by Gary Wright were used to include the 8,046 lines of C source code in the book.

I just had a big smile on my face after I first read this. Stevens was Unix to the very core.

Good bye, Rich. Good riddance, Slashdot.

[Tom Christiansen]

In my nearly two decades of habitation upon the Arpanet and its descendents, never before have I ever had the misfortune to witness so distressing a thread of messages as these. This unspeakably sickening invective against so kind a man, a man whom most of you never even knew, can have no other effect than to boggle the mind, wound the heart, and taint the soul with a nauseous stench.

Rich was always gentleman: pleasant, helpful, and courteous. Despite his fame and his skill, no prima donna was he. He was never bitter nor spiteful, never arrogant nor condescending. His humor and his insights inspired many of us, and not merely in our programming.

In the last few years that I came to know Rich a bit better as we shared a meal at random conferences scattered about the globe, I was always impressed by his irrepentantly positive attitude. Whatever the tale he told, whether a personal one relating to his children or his delightful rediscovery of the piano, a professional one related to programming and computers, or simply some incidental anecdote, that tale he presented with a childlike delight and glee. Rich displayed a perpetually positive attitude rare in a man even half his age. He was uplifting merely to be around.

Never was I so honored as on that day when Rich lamented not bringing his Perl Cookbook with him so he could get my autograph on it. I was deeply touched and completely surprised. Rich is acknowledged in the credits for his indirect help in preparing that book from our discussions of troff and systems programming matters. Despite his good taste and obvious skill, he had been for some time using Perl for various daily jobs. It's true that Rich had minor issues with Perl's cleanliness, but these were subsumed by the practical concerns of simply getting a job done easily and quickly. In short, it worked and he used it, and he was thankful it saved him time. The very things that the HTML crowd find hardest with Perl -- its Unix roots and proclivities -- Rich found immediately familiar and obvious. I am proud that I had ever so small a part in helping out a man who had tremendously helped me and thousands of others.

It is with nothing less than complete shock and surpassing shame that I have read here what so many insensitive malcontents have cruelly and unjustly scrawled. Doubtless these are the same twisted perverts who torture kittens and kick pregnant mothers, a sickness upon this medium and this planet. I hope these sociopaths find help soon, or at least remove themselves from the company of men and the gene pool.

Forget not this one inescapable fact: that where Rich has gone, so too inexorably goes each and every one of you walking shadows, and tragically sooner than you dare fathom. May you be remembered in the same measure as have you remembered those who preceded you down that lonesome path to dusty death.

It does not take a particularly compassionate and sensitive person to be sickened and hurt by these inexpressibly horrible postings. It takes nothing but a decent and caring human being, the sort of which we seem to have so few of these days--and today, to our loss, one fewer.