Shiro Kawai: Schemer, Lisper, Actor | Hacker News Reader

Shiro Kawai: Schemer, Lisper, Actor

90 pointsemmanueloga_21 comments

I was on my annual exploration of Scheme implementations, this time I focused my attention on Gauche for the first time...

I was surprised to find the twitter profile of the author, Shiro Kawai [1]. It turns out he also is a professional actor, has an imdb profile [2] and has been part of a lot of movies! People like this always make me feel [even more!] unaccomplished :-).

Anyway, thought it would be fun to ask here who knows of other multi-talented software developers.

1: https://twitter.com/anohana

2: http://imdb.me/shirokawai

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He also wrote a few [1][2] papers on how they used Scheme for movie production. One of those movies is "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" [3]. This movie was released 2001 and had one of the most advanced animations at that time.

Gauche scheme should get more attention because of stability and lean design. It is also actively maintained for last 20 years.

[1] http://practical-scheme.net/docs/jlugm2000.html

[2] http://practical-scheme.net/docs/gdc2002.html

[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0173840/

Kudos for mentioning the relation between FF:SW and Scheme, I didn't know that! This is one of my favorite movies since I was a kid. Pity the documentary [1] doesn't mention any of that.

The ideas from Gaia theory and neovitalism in it are what eventually got me into my MS program (neurorehabilitation & bio-signal processing), and venerable SICP was the first programming book that really clicked with me. Heck, I even bought a phantom figurine for my working desk.

Speaking of actors, "Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams" [2] has a whole chapter discussing Aki Ross (the main protagonist) as the first virtual actress, with a very interesting rhetoric (an excerpt follows):

Final Fantasy is made disturbing by the fact that not only the Phantoms but the human characters as well appear undead. The ontological uncertainty of these digital humans has several sources. While the Phantoms derive part of their proliferating, malignant vitality from the human spirits they prey on, the filmʼs CGI humans literally "vampirize" the motion-capture actors who modeled them. The elastic, dot-constellation figures produced by the computer from motion-capture data provided by real human actors absorbed, as it were, the latterʼs "lifeblood", which then became the "living material" of the digital actorʼs "lifelike" behavior.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1634340/

[2]: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/robot-ghosts-...

Oh! I remember watching The Spirits Within in theaters back then

Aliette de Bodard [1] is a French-American speculative fiction writer. A graduate of École Polytechnique, she works as a software engineer specializing in image processing.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliette_de_Bodard

Another multi-talented developer that comes to mind is the distinguished philosopher John McFarlane. He created pandoc, among some other things.

https://johnmacfarlane.net/index.html

https://usesthis.com/interviews/shiro.kawai/

Cool to see he seems fond of Clojure!, one of his second choices after Gauche

Found someone else: Vienna Teng [1], is an American pianist and singer-songwriter, computer science graduate that used to work at Cisco.

From her website bio: "These days, all that training mostly manifests itself in overly clever spreadsheet formulas." :-D

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_Teng

I worked with Shiro and he's a really nice guy and very smart. Yes, he wrote Lisp code for us. Our regex engine. Very high quality. He also plays the piano very well, I hear.

Do you mind elaborating on what you mean by "Our regex engine"? I'd love to hear more about what you needed a regex engine written in Lisp for.

Shiro wrote our "new" regex engine, to replace the one written in the 80's. It has served us very well.

https://franz.com/support/documentation/current/doc/regexp.h...

(I say new, because it's a bunch of years old, at this point... I forget when he did it)

I have an IMDb (with a Sundance winner and a documentary about myself as president of the local surf club), was a pretty good Architect with some of the most famous modern buildings (Steinhaus, Resowi, ...) in Austria, and worked in Formula 1 as engineer (cannot talk about that, but Mercedes should thank me a lot for their current run).

https://www.imdb.com/filmosearch?role=nm7259427

I’ve given up worrying about being unaccomplished in comparison to people I find on HN. Yeah normal curves gonna have outliers. Your probably an outlier yourself and maybe this guy is further out. So what. I’m not even good enough to attend a TEDX as an audience member apparently! Oh well there’re all on YouTube, and I watched live on a repeater screen.

Fair!

I've heard the advice of only comparing myself against myself in the past, etc, I think it makes sense. Sometimes (often) I forget about all that.

On a positive note, it _is_ pretty cool when I have a moment of clarity I and I manage to see accomplished people as inspiration instead of feeling behind.

That’s a great way to think about it. And sometimes they can be a mentor too!

Ok, to not spam this post anymore, here's a SPARQL query that returns some people Wikidata knows about that _both_ have a "computer related" profession and more than 2 professions.

https://w.wiki/Z8E

Took me a while to come up with something that wouldn't timeout... not sure why I spent so much time with this

He contributes amazing feedback to the SRFI (scheme request for implementation) process and I suspect also the r7rs process. Being the author of a good scheme implentation makes his feedback even more valuable, imho.

He also manages to always be very kind and seems curious in the mailing lists.

I heard a Japanese Podcast he attend, How he literally made Z80 "DIY PC" in child era is amazing.

There is Paul Graham: computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Graham_(programmer)

Why the downvotes?

Because you are in his site!

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