This week the Perl community lost one of its long time contributors, Nick Ing-Simmons, who died of a heart attack on Monday September 25th 2006.
Nick joined the Perl community in the early days of Perl 5. He consistently contributed to the perl5-porters mailing list and later became pumpkin for 5.003_02 where he added the initial implementation of the PerlIO layer.
Nick is probably best known for his work on the Tk and Encode modules. Tk was initially born out of frustration that perl didn't have a native GUI at the time. Nick tirelessly developed Tk for over a decade. Tk often influenced the development of the perl internals through its aggressive use of XS.
Nick was an intelligent person with a willingness to share his knowledge to help others and one who had a great passion about everything he did.
Our deepest condolences go out to his long time partner, Medi, and all those close to him.
The Perl community owes a lot to Nick so I am sure many will join us in saying
"Thanks Nick"
This is indeed a great loss for the community. Nick was a really classy guy who always turned whatever he was working on into something positive for others. He leaves a lot of goodwill in his wake.
-Ken
Too many good people are dying these days. God bless you Nick, may you rest in peace and eternal happiness. :(
When I was working with Perl/Tk, I came across Nick's comments on mailing lists frequently. His death is a loss for our community, a real tragedy. May Nick rest in peace.
Dear citizens of the "programming republic of Perl",
it is with deep shock and dismayal that I just read about the death of the father of Perl::Tk. It was his Tk that saved my day(s) in that it gave me an employment just when I direly was in need of one...
I'm too sad to find anything more to say...
Steffen Beyer (Mr. Date::Calc, Bit::Vector, Data::Locations etc.)
I am a happy user of Nick's software, which makes my everyday working life easier - and no doubt Nick's work had the same effect for countless other programmers around the world. To my dismay, I learned about his death today over a bug report that he will never receive. Which just goes to demonstrate that we best understand the value of people and the contribution they bring to the world once it is too late to express gratitude. Shame on me, I make a living on free software as if it was a commodity, yet people like Nick are not usually part of my prayers. Now they will, at chapter "thanksgiving".
I am a non-native english speaker and I may not be able to express my mood as poetically as the previous poster, but this does not make my condolences to Medi and relatives any less sincere.
Mr Simmons contribution to the perl community was incredible.
Tk is an incredible Perl Module...It's one of the best modules that I have ever seen in the Perl community.
How fantastic applications with incredible GUIs can be developed using Tk....and thanks to Mr Simmons.
I hope that someone else continues keeping, maintaning and updating his great baby...Tk
My condolences to his family and our great perl community