Re: [stack] Concatenative Hardware

On 11/2/07, Stevan Apter <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> who IS henry baker anyway?
>

Kind of funny you asked. I've heard his name referenced so many times,
but never really understood who he is, except some kind of programming
demigod who you can cite as a source of absolute truth. Wikipedia
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Baker_(computer_scientist)) says
"a computer scientist who has made contributions in garbage
collection, functional programming languages, and linear logic. He was
also one of the founders of Symbolics." but not much else. His website
(http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/), in dire need of a CSS file,
shows that he invented a whole bunch of stuff. I guess he's most
notable for Cheney on the MTA (a model for a CPS translation of Lisp
to C, the inspiration for Chicken) and his Linear Lisp, a lisp which
compiles to a forth and needs no garbage collection, just a whole
bunch of copying. He also opposed relational databases, and came up
with a whole bunch of algorithms.

But really, to me, he's somewhat of a mystery, still. Where did he
come from? What was his job?

Daniel Ehrenberg