It's come to my attention that John Bradley, author of the "xv" tool has died. I never knew John, but I used "xv" a LOT in the early days of my career as a graduate student working in computational physics.

In many ways "xv" might have been more pivotal to my early career than even Python.

In this thread, I'm going to offer my tribute to "xv" and say a bit about its role in my 1990s "vibe"-coding project that definitely did NOT involve any AI.

This will probably meander a bit. 1/n?

@dabeaz That's sad to hear, I didn't know him either but as a student and geek it saw many varied uses on my desktops. I still have the email (as I looked it up some months back) confirming that I'd actually paid to register it, having realised (and probably been prompted by someone else) that it's a massively used tool that gives no reason to register it other than the good feels of having done the right thing.