Talk:David A. Moon

WordPerfect
Is this the same David Moon who worked in management at WordPerfect? KellyCoinGuy 16:35, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
 * Only took two years to answer your question, but: No, doesn't seem so. According to, that one got his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science in 1983, and Moon was definitely a well-known figure well before then.  -- tiny plastic Grey Knight &#x2296; 15:11, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Crescent Moon
What a small stub for a significant figure... Hopefully when I get some time from work I'll get something in. I see there are links to some of the areas he's been involved in already, but we really need an actual article! -- tiny plastic Grey Knight &#x2296; 15:11, 30 July 2008 (UTC)

Another Moon
Professor David Moon has published widely on the social history of the Russian peasantry in the nineteenth century and then over longer periods, culminating in his study of the The Russian Peasantry, 1600-1930: The World the Peasants Made (1999). His current research is on the environmental history of the Russian steppes, c.1700-1914. -- C opper K ettle  04:19, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Notability?
Its not even clear if all the links on this page refer to the same person. Especially the MIT "story". Bangabandhu (talk) 00:03, 5 January 2017 (UTC)
 * The MIT story is definitely the same guy, but I removed it as it mentions Moon only trivially (as somebody that someone else in the story talked to). He's also mentioned in the "AI Koans", but again I don't see the point of mentioning it here. —David Eppstein (talk) 00:16, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

"he also invented ephemeral garbage collection"
I was curious what the cited work had to say about this. On page 28 of the text, the relevant portion reads:


 * While there was a great deal of theoretical work on interleaved and concurrent garbage collection during the 1970's [?; ?; Baker, 1978; ?], continuous garbage collection was not universally accepted until David Moon's invention of ephemeral garbage collection and its implementation on Lisp Machines [Moon, 1984].

I was going to insert that text into the citation - which I've seen done elsewhere on WP - but it wasn't immediately clear to me which of the ~35 pages of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Footnotes described how.

If anyone knows how, I'd be gracious if you inserted it. While you're welcome to instruct me (teach a man to fish,) since I'm not logged in, I don't believe I'll get a notification that you've done so. Cheers,

69.143.175.242 (talk) 01:01, 30 April 2018 (UTC)


 * The following, for example:

As part of the Lisp Machine project, he also invented ephemeral garbage collection, an advance that led to the widespread use of continuously-operating garbage collection systems in Lisp more generally.


 * results in the error

Cite error: Invalid tag; name "sg" defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).


 * The error makes sense, but it's obviously fairly frustrating. How does one refer to the same cited work as elsewhere, but provide different or additional metadata?  No idea.


 * I'm off to do something that has a higher effort-reward ratio.


 * 69.143.175.242 (talk) 16:52, 30 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I would think that people interested in this topic would also know about scoping of namespaces, but to answer your specific question: try using a different name than "sg". Or no name at all. —David Eppstein (talk) 17:14, 30 April 2018 (UTC)

Is there a better photo of him?
The current photo in the article is astoundingly blurry. Partofthemachine (talk) 05:33, 30 October 2022 (UTC)