@screwlisp @ramin_hal9001 @momo
It's a tiny point, but I was Project Editor for the ANSI CL spec, meaning I was the last to have my fingers on the keys editing it and had final responsibility for a document that then a whole community approved. There was lots feeding into my work there.
Steele's work on CLTL is actually a base document even though the work Kathy Chapman did successfully refactored much of that into dictionary entries. I did a lot of work smoothing the result of that. Pieces came in from various committees on objects, iteration, conditions, etc. I had a hand on the conditions document that was later integrated and then again in the final result.
It's worth people glancing through the acknowledgment section in CLHS to see all the people who did things of various kinds.
But, and this is the reason I started this comment: I didn't exactly author the HyperSpec. The ANSI CL document was already authored. I conceived and implemented and got approvals for deploying the code that translated the ANSI CL spec (a raw TeX, not even LaTeX document) into HTML. One important aspect of the program that did that is that it did NOT rewrite what was in the spec. That's so you have confidence you don't have to go get the spec to find out the real truth. It's more akin to having exported something to PDF, but in reverse, destroying the pretty typography of the ANSI CL spec and leaving the kind of clumsy but more versatile HTML in its place.
In fact, I did try hard to resist people's suggestions that I use fancy features of HTML that were emerging. I was worried they might not be stable and I wanted the resulting document to use things that I thought would be stable over time. So it was an exercise in minimalism, which gives it a kind of dated look, but for a reason.
But you said I "wrote the hyperspec" and technically I created it, by writing code that created it. But it feels funny to me to say I wrote it. It is not a work of authorship, it is a work of rendering. I will say that the code does massive work to infer hyperlinks when they were not there, and so that "rendering" is a more sophisticated rendering than typical engines. In some cases, there are queries I wanted to ask and I compiled them into specific static pages that ask the question so you can just click to the question and then to where the question would take you. Still, I count that as rendering.
I don't know. Some might still call that authorship. But is the author of a compiler the author of the programs it compiles? I'm thinking not. The thing that makes the HyperSpec is more of a compiler. I am OK being an author (or co-author, really) of the ANSI CL spec. But that little bit of terminological shift in discussing the HyperSpec maker keeps the bookkeeping straight for me. Maybe it's also a reminder to people that there are interesting things that can be done in the world even from documents or materials not specifically made to be inputs.
The application of imagination is more than authorship, not to denigrate authorship. CLHS, I guess in my mind, is maybe also more a work of art than a document. That it is just text yet comes to life is part of the work of art that is a web browser, for similar reasons. Another work of art those are.
My mind's analogy web is flagging a weird cross-reference that I hope will stretch your brain differently about what counts as technology and what is mere authorship. We think of technology as fancy gadgets, but really it's just working with available tools. The technology of yesteryear was built from different stuff than now. What matters is the clever use of available capability. So I'll just leave this cross-reference without explanation as an example of something I think is similar use of technology to solve a social problem. Maybe you'll agree or maybe not about whether this is even a valid example or what to name the category that both CLHS and this article exist in, but for now I'll just say that they seem related to me. :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20100921050348/http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2010/09/18/the_cornfield_explained
