Farewell, Spoon

petdance on 2004-01-12T22:12:36

Iain Truskett, or Spoon, will be sorely missed by the Perl community. He died on December 29th, 2003 in his home in Canberra, Australia.

Iain was a tireless contributor to Perl. Along the way, he:

• Wrote 15 Perl modules
  Iain especially loved to automate the web.
• Created and maintained the Perl Books site.
• Contributed two hacks to Spidering Hacks.
• Contributed numerous patches to Perl.
• Contributed many patches to my pet project, WWW::Mechanize
  If it weren't for Iain, I'd still have that bug with the back() method.

Even more importantly, Iain was a great colleague. I never met him, or even spoke to him except through email and IRC, but I feel like he was a friend. He was always willing to help out when possible, and at least discuss an idea when not.

One night, we were in IRC helping someone with a testing problem. The problem was solved with a module that the person didn't know existed. I said "We should get together a list of all the Perl testing modules and summarize what they do. Would you be willing to help out?" A couple of hours later, he'd taken care of A-M, where it took me days to finish up N-Z. Later, when I thanked him for jumping on it so quickly, he confessed, "I was really just avoiding real work. :-)"

Farewell, Spoon. I wish I'd had a chance to meet you before you left so soon. We'll miss you.

---

Yeah.

hex on 2004-01-13T10:07:39

I only spoke to him a couple of times; he patched some of the code in Time::Beat, a silly little module that was one of the first things I did. But it still hurts.

Farewell, Spoon

monsterzero on 2004-01-13T13:54:20

I would like to add he was very active on the DateTime project. He will be missed very much.