Eric Lippert was my hero back when his blog was hosted on MSDN. Sad to see him go into retirement when he's at his prime. Hope he finds some new exciting project.
In contrast, I'm sad to see so many people spend their prime sitting at a desk 8+ hours a day, ever day.
Getting old is rough. At no point in your life will it be easier to scuba dive, take nature photography, travel, or whatever your passion is. Eric's done this for 25+ years and presumably has a good amount of savings; why not take advantage of other parts of life?
Given how many greatly appreciated his blog and have been upset at the last few years of Facebook-encouraged radio silence (including myself, Eric Lippert has been a blogger I've looked forward to posts from), even if he were to just fall into the exciting "old" project of blogging regularly again (as his post teases at the bottom), I think that would be a great use of "his prime" and I wouldn't exactly call that a retirement either. Our industry tends to forget, overlook, and/or look down on pedagogy (teaching), but I think it is worthy enough to celebrate a great teacher returning to teaching after lost years away.
I hope, if Eric does need to return to laboring for someone else's company that he does so without restriction to his teaching efforts, as he has seemed to always enjoy that. But I think more fervently I hope that Eric finds out what he wants to do, and if maybe that is teaching that is high calling, often underserved in this industry, and that he can find a fulfilling way to do that on his own terms as his own vocation. That may look like a retirement to a lot of us on HN, but I think there are few things more worthy to be doing with your time than a "hobby" that has clearly already educated a lot of people in threads around here.
I have several times been offered the chance to teach a masters level course on compiler design but never had the time to develop it. After a bit of a break, maybe I'll give that more thought.
As always, please put self-care first. But if you ever end up developing a course or workshop on compiler design, I'll be the first person to sign up.
Your blog both inspired me to go into my current line of work and taught me so many of the skills I needed to succeed. I'm sad that so much of your and your colleagues' work is ultimately not going to reach its full potential. At the same time, I can't say I'm not excited that one of my favorite blogs is hopefully going to resume at some point in the future :)
If you do end up thinking about this seriously, I think the world could absolutely use a course looking at how to build compilers like APIs and how to build compilers that put IDE experiences first. Just about every college course prepares students for how to build batch compilers that do one thing and quit, with zero extension points.
If there was a course structured so as to teach compiler principles in a Roslyn way, I’d enroll today.
