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Comment by mynameishere | Hacker News Reader

Am I alone in thinking this is guy is an object lesson in how not to live? Was he just a usenet snark-generation unit? Because I've read all the obituaries, and that seems to be the man's mortal summation.

As an extreme encomium, can anyone point to something he actually did?

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http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ErikNaggum

He contributed many patches to GNU Emacs from version 19.26 to 20.4. A fan of Common Lisp, he took Emacs Lisp in the direction of Common Lisp. He contributed early support for multiple character sets. He quit over the introduction of MULE to GNU Emacs and for a while maintained a “multi-byte survival kit” for Emacs 20 users who wanted Emacs 19 character set behaviour.

Conveying insight is "doing". Here's some pointers to some stuff he wrote that wasn't snark-based: http://xach.livejournal.com/221433.html

Here's a description of him as a person:

http://thesubclassexplosion.wordpress.com/2009/06/20/erik-na...

afaik he was not much of a contributor to the open source arena. He was however one of very few lisp programmers who had a job, programming in lisp. Someone pointed out that he wrote a billing system among other.

Anybody can be paid to write "lisp" for a living, just work closely with small business owners and provide them with "software solutions". I have been a working Lisper since 2001, pretty much since I bought Winston and Horn and started replacing C++ with it, but I digress.

Naggum, RIP good fella.

He made us think.

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