Re: François Pinard RIP

[Eric Abrahamsen <eric@ericabrahamsen.net>]

Thorsten Jolitz <tjolitz@gmail.com> writes:

> Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us> writes:
>
>> Nick Dokos <ndokos@gmail.com> 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.

Thanks for this, Thorsten.