In Memoriam: Ricardo Lopes

Vitor Santos Costa, Fernando Silva, Michele Ferreira, Ricardo Rocha,
University of Porto, Portugal

As the ALP newsletter looks forward, it is important to remember the road traveled. And sometimes, we just want to remember people whom we deeply cared for and that cannot be with us any longer.

For us in Porto, remembering means “saudade” of our colleague and friend Ricardo Lopes. It was a good story, one that should have been written for quite a bit longer, but that ceased sooner than we expected. In my case, it really started when we convinced him to work with us in his Master studies. He chose to work on native code generation for YAP in his dissertation. It was great
work, and maybe we should have pushed it further. But Ricardo was ambitious: he wanted to explore new paths, to try something new, so we challenged him with David H D Warren’s Extended Andorra Model. Ricardo got his Ph.D. degree with his work on the BEAM and most people in the Logic Programming community will know him from that work. We think it still is at the forefront of Logic Programming.

A person leaves different memories to different people he touches. Ricardo was loved in different ways by his family, his friends, his colleagues, his students. But we all miss Ricardo’s big heart. He was the person people would naturally come to ask for help. Not just because he was glad to help, but because he would do it as a friend. He was the person I trusted with maintaining YAP. Not just because he was a smart guy, but because it was natural for him to do it.

It was painful to see Ricardo go. He was looking at the future, starting to fork off his own independent research, experimenting with new directions. And then, all was over. For us, it is still hard to write about it, still hard to remember.

Ricardo leaves his beloved wife and daughter behind. His lovely daughter is his best tribute, and we are happy that she is doing well.

We miss you!