John Walker has passed

[pete]

I suspect the news probably propagated to everyone here by now, but John Walker died February 2: https://scanalyst.fourmilab.ch/t/john-walker-1949-2024/4305 . (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297185 ).

For anyone that does not know, he was the creator of AutoCAD/AutoDesk and created ATLAST, a public-domain FORTH-like language, to encourage programmability to be added. Feeling that AutoLisp was a performance bottleneck but hooked on embedded automation, he created the "Autodesk Threaded Language Application System Toolkit" and released it into the public domain to encourage use. (I personally got a lot of use out of it, and still use my little fork daily.) He was a prolific writer and his reasoning for choosing FORTH was interesting and insightful: https://www.fourmilab.ch/atlast/ .