alt Hacker NewsAs a greybeard (literally) of the industry, I've reached the age where the people who shaped my younger years, and much of the computing world around me, are slowly being piped to /dev/random.
It's sad to hear, but reflecting on the impact Tim made brings some comfort. Most of us will never know how many people our work helped. Tim could at least see some of that, though even Python's reach can only tell part of the story.
Reading the tributes (https://discuss.python.org/t/in-memoriam-tim-peters-1952-202...), what strikes me is how often people mention his patience and humour alongside his technical brilliance. There's something to aspire to there: doing good work, and taking the time to help others do theirs.
The older I get, the more I appreciate what it takes to leave both kinds of legacy.
Quiet lines of code Still guide the hands of strangers His kindness lives on
Rest well, Tim.
Replies
> slowly being piped to /dev/random.
Some are gently deallocated. Others are garbage-collected.
Indeed, as someone with some grey in his beard, it hits harder because these where names I was familiar with when I was young (and now I'm not), I've never really been in the python world but I've used it a fair bit over the years and so I've seen comments from Tim here and there, it seeps into your conscious over time.
There are a handful of names in the tech industry who will hit me particularly hard and among those one who will really make me pause.
They will leave behind work that continues to impact the world but given the choice I'd still have them in it.
In my case none of the work I leave behind is going to mean a real lot outside of the people who paid me for that and I'm old enough that the majority of what I've written over the years is now no longer having any impact (refactored or replaced after years) though I'm aware of one that is still actively supported now that is 17 years old.
Almost everything all of us do in terms of actual work output is transient but we do leave memories, I have a mental list of programmers I've worked with over the years who left a last impact and while none of them afaik had the impact of Tim Peters broadly they did narrowly for me at least.