From: Michael Guterl <mguterl@...>
Date: 2008-09-25T09:49:12+09:00
Subject: Re: [ruby-core:18872] [RIP] Guy Decoux.

On Wed, Sep 24, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Jean-François Trân
<jftran@rubyfrance.org> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm sad to announce you Guy Decoux's death in the beginning of the month
> of July 20008. He was 53 years old. He died accidentally, intoxicated by
> the smokes of the fire that took place during the night in his flat in
> Louveciennes (near Paris).
>
>
> Guy Decoux was network and system admin at the Plant Genomics
> Research Unit of INRA (Agricultural Research labs, where he worked
> since 1982) in Moulon's Farm (Moulon's plateau [1], in the south west
> of Paris).
>
> He was an Internet pioneer. For example, he worked on Oraplex,
> one of the first Oracle to web gateways. He deployed the first
> website that gave access to an ACeDB [2] system by the end of 1993.
> He had worked on bioinformatic free software, like ProticDB [3], a
> plant proteomic database.
>
> He was part of the generation of developers who switched from Perl
> to Ruby in the 90s. While his mastering of Perl was already great,
> his knowledge about Ruby was so deep and impressive that a lot of Rubyists
> would have been very happy to have the same one. Guy contributed to
> Dave Thomas' book, "Programming Ruby". Of course he polled for the
> comp.lang.ruby and fr.comp.lang.ruby newsgroups creation.
> He was maintaining some libraries like PL/Ruby [4] a procedural language
> for PostgreSQL, bdb/bdb1 [5] bindings for Berkeley DB, bz2 [6]
> bindings the libbzip2 compression library and MMap [7] class,
> a class for Memory-mapped files.
>
> To my knowledge, he was the only french person to have commits right
> to Ruby MRI source code. I don't know if he was officially member
> of the Ruby Core Team (I don't know if there is an official Ruby Core
> Team list).
>
> I'm not sure 'ts' (what does 'ts' mean in his electronic address?)
> had ever been to RubyConf nor any Ruby conference. Well I don't
> know if there is a french Rubyist who ever meet him. Was he mysterious
> or secret ? Maybe he was just reserved. His colleagues described
> Guy as reserved, kind, available, professional and technically
> very competent. His messages on Ruby-Core or Ruby-Talk, sometimes
> with a bit of humor, show all that.
>
>
> This is a loss for Ruby Community.
>
>
> In the name of french association RubyFrance, I present my condolences
> to Guy Decoux's family, his friends and his collegues.
>
>
>   -- Jean-François.
>
>
> News URL :
> http://www.rubyfrance.org/articles/2008/09/25/disparition-de-guy-decoux
>
> [1] http://moulon.inra.fr
> This explains the 'moulon' server name in the prompt shell
> that can be found in Guy's messages on the Internet.
>
> [2] ACeDB is a genomic OO and relational database system :
> http://wwww.acedb.org
>
> [3] ProcticDB : http://moulon.inra.fr/%7Ebioinfo/PROTICdb
>
> [4] PL/Ruby : http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/pl-ruby
>
> [5] bdb & bdb1 : http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/bdb
>  http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/bdb1
>
> [6] bz2 : http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/bz2
>
> [7] MMap : http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/mmap
>
>

It is very sad to hear this, but I thank you for letting us all know.

Guy will be missed.