John Walker (1949-2024) was an amazing programmer. His website “Fourmilab” was a page of inspiration for me since 1994, when the web started to get serious with Mosaic allowing to brouwse the internet. I still remember in early spring 1994, when I was busy finishing my PhD, that near our Sun Workstations the announcement came “Mosaic is here!”. Before that we would telnet around to visit other computers (which were almost all open) or use Gopher to browse the web. I only learned about his death today when wondering what happened with fourmilab. I wondered why the website has no more been updated since a year. I then found a The NYT article about him. Walker was a true hacker (in a good sense): he wrote highly creative, elegant and beautiful programs. I myself admire especially “from the ground up” programmers, folks who can write elegant, beautiful programs from scratch without relying on libraries (or now stuff like copilot or heaven forbid, AI). (It inspired me early to try myself). I still use regularly some of his programs like “demoronyzer” or “flashback” which are part of a collection of Unit utilities. I also liked his anagram finder. The reason to mention him here on this quantum calculus blog is because of his amazing CA automaton laboratory he wrote with an other hacker and cyberpunk author Rudy Rucker. For me, he was not only inspiring because of his programming but because Walker was a model person for:
- creativity: founding a successful company autodesk, writing ANIMAL (first self replicating computer program), (Assembly source code), authoring many, many beautiful programs, creating new ideas like the scanalyst
- no-nonsense approach to programming (in particular also functional no-nonsense webdesign)
- open sourcing everything
- being able to do stuff himself and not just delegating stuff, also nitty gritty details
- down to the detail knowledge
- being a universalist: specialist in wide array of things (not only math, physics, computer science).
Apropos: almost 10 years ago, on July 16, 2015, I wrote for a Technology Demo CA automata demo. I’m still proud today about having done this from scratch, without template and seeing it to perform so fast in javascript. Here is the Javascript. It took me a day to write (and maybe an other day to make it fast). I’m sure in that time, John Walker has written his much more sophisticated demo which allows to upload images, explore hundrets of different models and modify speed, color palette etc etc etc.
