Archive 21. June 2009

Erik Naggum, 1965-2009 RIP - it's strange to read an obituary for a Usenet poster and be touched by it - even if you never met the person yourself, only occasionally exchanged emails or news postings with them, and often shook your head at a thread in which he was involved. He was always uncomfortable. Nevertheless (or perhaps precisely because of that), he often and strongly shaped comp.lang.lisp. And sometimes he provoked thought.

software - xml - s-exp vs XML - and since it fits so well, one of his master postings about markup languages and their comparison to lisp S-Exprs. "If GML was an infant, SGML is the bright youngster far exceeds expectations and made its parents too proud, but XML is the drug-addicted gang member who had committed his first murder before he had sex, which was rape."