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Re: [O] François Pinard RIP


From: Thorsten Jolitz
Subject: Re: [O] François Pinard RIP
Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 12:22:57 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux)

Rasmus <address@hidden> writes:

> Nick Dokos <address@hidden> writes:
>
>> I just found out that François Pinard (author of org grep among other
>> tools and frequent contributor to this list) died recently:

This is sad news. 

Somehow, whenever I had an idea for a *brandnew*, cool&useful little Org
library and went ahead implementing it, it turned out that François had
this idea before and already had implemented his own version of the
library. 

This happened first when I announced Outorg, only to find out that he
had announced Poporg a few weeks ago. 

Then someone requested a feature for Outshine that shows the number of
hidden lines in folded headlines, which I implemented and then factored
out as the small 'org-hlc.el' library (Org hidden-lines-cookies). Only
to find out a bit later that there was 'org-weights.el' by - guess
whom. 

The completely different implementations show that all these libraries
were developed completely independently, but nevertheless - François was
very kind and friendly all the time, not a sign of anger that somebody
'stole ideas' or 'doubled efforts' or so. It actually became a kind of
internal joke between us that for whatever project I started, he already
had an implementation in his "back-catalogue", and I used to send him a
PM first before starting a new project. 

While its normally a pretty frustrating thing to write a library that
already exists, it turned out that our implementations complemented each
other rather than competed with each other (see our joint article
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-outside-org.html on Worg). So
nowadays I tend to use his Poporg (https://github.com/pinard/poporg) for
editing doc-strings of functions and variables in Org-mode, and my own
Outorg for editing whole subtrees and (outshine) buffers in Org-mode.

Its sad that this extremely friendly "competition" between Org library
writers cannot continue.

RIP

-- 
cheers,
Thorsten




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