[glaforge]

I believe I met Bob for the first time in 2007. I was already leading the Apache Groovy project back then (started in 2003) and had the chance to do a "tech talk" at Google, in Mountain View, to present the language to Google engineers.

In the crowd, there were pretty famous people like Guido Van Rossum (of Python fame), Cédric Beust (TestNG), Romain Guy (on Android), Patrick Chanezon... and of course "Crazy" Bob Lee, who was working on Guice and the Android libraries. Very humbling.

I then met him a few times at JavaOne, and maybe some other Java-related conferences or parties! I didn't know him very well though, but I highly respected him. However we had some heated-discussions on programming languages! Bob thought Groovy wouldn't last long, but Groovy is still there 20 years later. He was rooting for BeanShell...

Oh time flies!

It's so sad, so terrible! I often walked those streets myself (the Google office is right around the corner)

My thoughts go to his family, his two daughters.

[KingOfCoders]

What a thread with all those people from the mid-2000s.

[karianna]

It’s a reunion for the worst of reasons but it’s a testament to crazy on of how many people he made feel awesome along the way

[noisy_boy]

Crazy thread indeed; I am writing Groovy code and a past lead of Apache Groovy turns up to pay tribute.

[glaforge]

And in my current project, I'm using Bob's creation, the @Inject annotation that he introduced when he was leading the work on JSR-330!

[noisy_boy]

Thanks for mentioning that - sent me learning more about the nuances of @Inject vs @Autowired (Spring shop here; I gather Bob hated Spring and my feelings about it aren't super warm either).