In Memoriam – Russel Winder

For the past few years Russel had been the chair of the ACCU conference and as such he stood up at the podium each morning and, after reading out the various administrative announcements, would close with a simple request that we attendees should “be lovely to each”, a sentiment that he attributes to Stephen Fry. If ever there was a person who practised what he preached it was Russel Winder, I would struggle to think of many people I’ve met who are genuinely as lovely to other people as Russel Winder was.

I first became aware of Russel through being a member of ACCU and over the past 10 years or so his writing, talks, and conversations in the bar have had an impact on both my programming career and, perhaps more importantly, my outlook and behaviour towards others. Despite being a seriously smart person he always acted with a level of interest and enthusiasm that made you feel special because it never felt like you were encroaching on his time. Like Marvin he had a brain the size of a planet but fortunately he had a far more positive outlook in life!

Russel came to my first ever ACCU conference talk and I approached him afterwards for his opinion as I had already seen him talk a few times and I was nervous about what he might say. Fortunately I needn’t have worried because his feedback was entirely constructive and presented in a way that made me confident I should do it again – that both my content and technique wasn’t quite the disaster I felt it might have been. He attended a couple of my other talks in the following years and always provided useful, postive feedback when I solicited it. In retrospect I should probably have talked to him before going on stage as I’m sure his enthusiasm and soothing tone would be the perfect pep talk to calm any nerves.

As a writer I often felt Russel was channelling Douglas Adams – mixing excellent knowledge of the subject with splashes of humour that made his words a joy to read. If there was an opportunity to reference The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy you can be sure it would appear. Concurrency was always a popular topic and while many of us were fumbling around in the weeds trying to tame threads and low-level synchronization primitives Russel was a beacon of light for higher-order concurrency patterns showing us where we really needed to be, which ironically was 30-40 years earlier when they originally worked a tlot of this stuff out. If one mission to educate the world on message passing instead of shared memory multi-threading wasn’t enough, he was a true maverick, and an early adopter and proponent of using proportional fonts and ligatures for making code more readable.

Some, if not most, of the awareness I have of other programming languages likely comes from Russel; definitely the more esoteric ones like Chapel. He was a polyglot and often appeared to be solving the same problem in different languages because he couldn’t decide which was the most expressive. As a consequence his love of programming and his words were infectious. I dabbled in Go as a consequence of his articles and I’m fairly sure taking a contract that involves working with D is in some part influenced by his own interest. While I’m yet to tackle Groovy I already feel a degree of preparedness from his articles and sense of impending enjoyment awaits me. From what I remember of his few Code Critique entries there was always a sense of “whole”, of bringing together strands from different paradigms that added something extra over and above making the code under scrutiny simply “work”.

There are many people I have only ever met at an ACCU conference but Russel is one of the few people I seemed to bump into no matter what conference I attended whether it be Python, Go, C++, GOTO, etc. He was never too busy to say hello and find out what you were up to despite the many other attendees that were vying for his attention.

As a reviewer for the Overload journal I got to repay some of my debt of gratitude by providing feedback on his articles. Once again I found him to be incredibly humble even when I felt my observations might have been considered naïve and was worried that he might disregard them as a waste of time. On the contrary he wanted to reach a wide audience and appeared to be happy to address any concerns that might make his article less accessible to those of us nearer the beginning of our journey. I did wonder if he delayed his articles occasionally to ensure it featured in the August edition to allow him to make his “august August” quip, just one of a few words I learned from him. I’m pretty sure I never leave off the dieresis in “naïve” either after he made me aware of its presence one day via Twitter.

In essence I think Russel epitomises much of what the ACCU stands for – professionalism in programming, but also professionalism in character. It only seems appropriate that I too should borrow from Douglas Adams and say that Russel was undoubtedly a “hoopy frood” who always knew where his towel was.

Chris Oldwood
11 February 2021