Sun, 07 Mar 2021
(Summary: Henry Baker's web site has disappeared after 30 years. I kept an archive.)
Henry G. Baker is a computer programmer and computer scientist, one of the founders of the Symbolics company that made Lisp Machines.
I discovered Baker's writing probably in the early 1990s and immediately put him on my “read everything this person writes” list. I found everything he wrote clear and well-reasoned. I always learned something from reading it. He wrote on many topics, and when he wrote about a topic I hadn't been interested in, I became interested in it because he made it interesting.
Sometimes I thought Baker was mistaken about something. But usually it was I who was mistaken.
Baker had a web site with an archive of his articles and papers. It disappeared last year sometime. But I have a copy that I made around 1998, Just In Case.
Baker's web site is a good example of mid-1990s web design. Here's his “Gratuitous Waste of Bandwidth” page. It features a link to a 320×240 pixel color photo of Baker, and an inlined monochrome GIF version of it.
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Browsers at the time could inline GIF files but not JPEGs, and it would have been rude to inline a color JPEG because that would have forced the user to wait while the browser downloaded the entire 39kb color image. It was a rather different time.
Some of my favorite articles of his were:
CONS Should not CONS its Arguments, or, a Lazy Alloc is a Smart Alloc
(The Internet Archive also has a more recent copy of the site.)
Addendum 20220108
I just rediscovered this note I wrote in 2006 but never published:
The bozo bit isn't really a bit; it works in the other direction too. Some people are so consistently thoughtful and insightful that I go looking for stuff they have said, and pay extra-close attention to it, particularly if I disagree with it, because that indicates a greater-than-average chance that I am mistaken about something.
Henry Baker is one of these people. I try to read everything Henry Baker writes, extra carefully, because in the past I've determined that he seems to be correct about almost everything. If M. Baker says something I think is probably wrong, that's a good sign that I should reconsider, because there's a decent chance that I'm the one that's wrong.
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