Dan McCracken died, peacefully in his sleep | Hacker News Reader

Dan McCracken died, peacefully in his sleep

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100 pointsasnyder22 comments

Last year I wrote a fan letter of sorts to Professor McCracken, thanking him for his ForTran book, which I credited as my inspiration for what became my life work. (Ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1710523 )

He replied to my letter, saying:

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"I love your story!!! Warms my heart like little else. I am absolutely delighted to have had a hand in your choice of career, given that you are pleased with the choice.

"By golly, I too think my books were clear! I'm still teaching. Not Fortran, but beginning CS. When I get frantic I pick out my first Fortran book, or a later one, and look for a good example. It's usually there!

"Makes me think of writing a book in a modern language. For about two seconds. The energy isn't there any more. Love to teach, but writing a book is a very much bigger deal than it was back then, and I don't see how I could hack it. Well, I am 79.

"Thanks a million for your mail. Definitely made my day."

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I'm glad today that I got to do that. RIP, Professor.

I was privileged to have him as a Professor. We would have lunch sometimes and discuss programming paradigms and modern web techniques. He'll be missed.

You had an opportunity I could only dream of.

I've never had access to a mentor of any kind, on the job or otherwise.

I still hope to have one someday.

That he would spend that kind of time with his students (undergrad? grad? I don't know or care.) is impressive and says a lot.

I just took his course last semester. Glad I had the opportunity. He was always full of interesting stories.

I never knew him or even knew of him until now. But it must be grand to pass on like that after a long meaningful life that impacted many others. I look forward to exploring his works.

Do people really "die peacefully in their sleep" or is this a euphemism? I can't imagine, given how painful (eg) a heart attack is, that you could sleep through it.

Maybe it wasn't a heart attack.

The current theory goes that dying peacefully in sleep is possible. Elizabeth Simpson of the Virginian-Pilot explored this question further and a nice little article summarizing the excerpts from the AHCJ discussion can be found at: http://www.healthjournalism.org/blog/2011/07/reporter-explor...

My question is, given the existence of sleep paralysis which is both terrifying and plausibly able to leave "no evidence of thrashing about", if many people died "peacefully" but also awake and very scared.

As a sufferer of sleep paralysis, I would think it almost impossible that sleep paralysis itself could persist through dying painfully, since pain or other external stimuli (or passage of time, usually less than a minute) will generally kick you out of it.

That doesn't preclude the existence of some other paralysis mechanism, but I am not aware of any, so I think it's just wild speculation.

My father, who passed last winter, showed signs of dying peacefully while awake. He was lying back on his bed, whith his hands behind his head, like he was thinking about something when they found him. There was no sign of discomfort or struggle- only, really, curiosity (but I am probably assuming too much with that).

As I'm sure you've guessed, it's sometimes an emotional defense mechanism on the part of the survivors. Don't know anyone who wants to envision their loved one's last moments in agony, even if true.

I've attended dozens of deaths over the years, and many hours of medical training.

Yes, some folks do appear to die peacefully. And some folks don't sleep through it. And some folks will die through particularly ugly and unpleasant processes.

In some specific cases, we do know that the death did not entail any struggling or other manifestations of discomfort.

And you are quite wrong about your concept of how a heart attack can present itself. Some are quite silent. Some - in older men and particularly in older females and reportedly due to differences in and degradations in the cardiac innervation - can be undiagnosed or misdiagnosed or missed - and sometimes these cardiac problems might only trigger a so-called syncopal episode. The person "zones out" for a little while, or "faints". This due to a transient drop in blood pressure.

In cases I'm very familiar with, the person simply stopped talking to me, and appeared to doze off, and the cardiac monitor went into alert.

In others, I've encountered a number of cases where the only evidence of a heart attack was in the cardiac enzymes test, or due to specific artifacts seen in subsequent cardiac monitoring.

I'm a City College Student. I've taken 2 courses with Prof. McCracken and spoken with him privately on several occasions as well. He was an amazing man. A truly kind heart who knew how to bring out the best in people. Teaching was something he was very passionate about, he was still teaching courses last spring, well past the point of retirement. Dan McCracken knew how to make a difference to people and that was his real gift.

He could instruct in technical subjects, but he was already over that point of his life when I got to meet him. He had written his books, done his service with the ACM, made his contributions to the profession. What he devoted himself to later in life was cultivating people. He knew exactly how to nudge a student in the right direction to make them press onward. It worked for me. I don't think I would have made it through my freshman year without his encouragement.

I'll miss him. He was a wonderful person, a great teacher, and a warm presence. We should all be so lucky to as to know someone like him.

One of the few theologian-programmers. RIP.

Not as rare as you would think. Knuth, though not formally trained, has been doing the same (from his wikipedia page):

>In addition to his writings on computer science, Knuth, a Lutheran,[10] is also the author of 3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated,[11] in which he examines the Bible by a process of systematic sampling, namely an analysis of chapter 3, verse 16 of each book. Each verse is accompanied by a rendering in calligraphic art, contributed by a group of calligraphers under the leadership of Hermann Zapf.

3:16 is a beautiful book, and the idea underlying it is a very nice one. Knuth also has a book called "Things a computer scientist rarely talks about", derived from a set of lectures he gave at MIT, which is mostly about the 3:16 project.

I don't think it was exactly "a group of calligraphers under the leadership of Hermann Zapf". I think Knuth worked with each calligrapher individually; Zapf just happens to be the most famous of them (albeit mostly for his work in typography).

Someone -- I forget who -- called Knuth's technique in the 3:16 project "the way of the cross section", which is a lovely pun.

(In case it is relevant to anyone's evaluation of the above: I am an atheist but spent years as a Christian.)

I always felt programming was a very theological exercise. Where else can you sit down and just start saying "let there be..." and have things come into existence?

Its hard not to let it push your cosmology a tiny bit.

Should there be a Black bar at the top to signified a great person has died?

I'm sitting here looking at the brown, dog-eared old McCracken Fortran IV book from my high school comp sci class (1978). What magic it was to conceive of a program, cut it onto punched cards, suck the stack through a card reader, and then see my output appear, line by line, on the dot-matrix printer. Thank you, professor, for your contribution to computer science and for inspiring me to find the work I love.

I used his FORTRAN book for my first job out of college - very useful.

he was a nice person and great professor... I am glad I had the opportunity to take a class with him

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