Hello,

I’m sad to announce you Guy Decoux’s death in the beginning of the month

of July 20008. He was 53 years old. He died accidentally, intoxicated by

the smokes of the fire that took place during the night in his flat in

Louveciennes (near Paris).

Guy Decoux was network and system admin at the Plant Genomics

Research Unit of INRA (Agricultural Research labs, where he worked

since 1982) in Moulon’s Farm (Moulon’s plateau [1], in the south west

of Paris).

He was an Internet pioneer. For example, he worked on Oraplex,

one of the first Oracle to web gateways. He deployed the first

website that gave access to an ACeDB [2] system by the end of 1993.

He had worked on bioinformatic free software, like ProticDB [3], a

plant proteomic database.

He was part of the generation of developers who switched from Perl

to Ruby in the 90s. While his mastering of Perl was already great,

his knowledge about Ruby was so deep and impressive that a lot of

Rubyists

would have been very happy to have the same one. Guy contributed to

Dave T.’ book, “Programming Ruby”. Of course he polled for the

comp.lang.ruby and fr.comp.lang.ruby newsgroups creation.

He was maintaining some libraries like PL/Ruby [4] a procedural language

for PostgreSQL, bdb/bdb1 [5] bindings for Berkeley DB, bz2 [6]

bindings the libbzip2 compression library and MMap [7] class,

a class for Memory-mapped files.

To my knowledge, he was the only french person to have commits right

to Ruby MRI source code. I don’t know if he was officially member

of the Ruby Core Team (I don’t know if there is an official Ruby Core

Team list).

I’m not sure ‘ts’ (what does ‘ts’ mean in his electronic address?)

had ever been to RubyConf nor any Ruby conference. Well I don’t

know if there is a french Rubyist who ever meet him. Was he mysterious

or secret ? Maybe he was just reserved. His colleagues described

Guy as reserved, kind, available, professional and technically

very competent. His messages on Ruby-Core or Ruby-Talk, sometimes

with a bit of humor, show all that.

This is a loss for Ruby Community.

In the name of french association RubyFrance, I present my condolences

to Guy Decoux’s family, his friends and his collegues.

– Jean-François.

News URL :

http://www.rubyfrance.org/articles/2008/09/25/disparition-de-guy-decoux

[1] http://moulon.inra.fr

This explains the ‘moulon’ server name in the prompt shell

that can be found in Guy’s messages on the Internet.

[2] ACeDB is a genomic OO and relational database system :

http://wwww.acedb.org

[3] ProcticDB : http://moulon.inra.fr/~bioinfo/PROTICdb

[4] PL/Ruby : http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/pl-ruby

[5] bdb & bdb1 : http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/bdb

http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/bdb1

[6] bz2 : http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/bz2

[7] MMap : http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/mmap