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7 unusual facts about Philip Greenspun


ArsDigita

ArsDigita was a web development company cofounded by Philip Greenspun, Tracy Adams, Ben Adida, Eve Andersson, Olin Shivers, Aure Prochazka, and Jin Choi and was started in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid-1990s.

ArsDigita Prize

All first runners-up received a free trip to the computer research laboratories at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seats at a two-day seminar taught by Philip Greenspun, lunch with David D. Clark, Tim Berners-Lee and Michael Dertouzos, dinner with Hal Abelson and Gerry Sussman, and access to a Web server for life.

The ArsDigita Prize, sponsored by ArsDigita and Philip Greenspun, was awarded annually in June 1999, 2000, and 2001 to young people who created "useful, educational, and collaborative" non-commercial Web sites.

Geek.com

NameMedia had recently acquired Philip Greenspun's photo.net and was building out its Enthusiast Media Network, where Geek.com would be the lead technology site.

Philip Greenspun

Greenspun released the software behind photo.net as a free open-source toolkit called the ArsDigita Community System, built on top of the Oracle relational database management system.

Greenspun is a volunteer for Angel Flight and, on December 6, 2010, assisted in the first nationally arranged kidney paired-donation in which kidneys were flown from Lebanon, New Hampshire to St. Louis and vice versa.

Among software engineers, Greenspun is known for his Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."



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