About a year and a half ago I commented on a blog post he has made (it was a rather minor point in regards to consistency in distributed databases, I think). Dan replied to me via email with a follow up question and we had some correspondence about distributed systems, databases, and (naturally) Lisp. He ended up helping me edit a rough draft of a blog post, which ended up being very well received.
Several things struck me. First, expertise went across many disciplines of CS (from programming languages, to hardware, to databases) and beyond. He could have easily had fame as "Lisp guy", or "object oriented databases guy", or "CPU design guy" but he went above and beyond.
Finally, despite his repute, not only was he approachable (as evidenced by many stories here of folks carrying on correspondence with Dan), but he was curious and interested in learning from others, e.g., he noticed I listed OCaml on my LinkedIn profile and asked a question related to an article Erik Meijer's wrote about Linq and F#.
Several things struck me. First, expertise went across many disciplines of CS (from programming languages, to hardware, to databases) and beyond. He could have easily had fame as "Lisp guy", or "object oriented databases guy", or "CPU design guy" but he went above and beyond.
Finally, despite his repute, not only was he approachable (as evidenced by many stories here of folks carrying on correspondence with Dan), but he was curious and interested in learning from others, e.g., he noticed I listed OCaml on my LinkedIn profile and asked a question related to an article Erik Meijer's wrote about Linq and F#.
He will be sorely missed.