User Profile

I'm a programmer living outside of Boston. I've been programming since I was 11, and have learned, on average, about one new language a year since them. My preferred language...well, it depends on context. At work I use Common Lisp and C++; for language development I prefer Standard ML; for most casual hacking I use Python; for stuff that needs performance I use C++. Sometimes these conflict, of course; right now (2008), I'm working on a massively parallel language called Duende, and I have to write it in C++, since I need a language that gives me native threading both on x86 and on ARM (i.e., on my handheld).

I also like Erlang and Scheme, but I haven't gotten much chance to use them. I used Ruby on Rails at a recent Web project, and learned to loathe it. (Patching the standard classes on the fly is fun, but I just can't put up with a language that can't recognize that "a NEWLINE and b" means the same thing as "a and b".) I like the idea behind Smalltalk, but the only version I've used (Squeak) turned me off the second time the VM crashed and lost an hour's worth of work.

I used to use Perl for general scripting; now I don't use it for anything more than a one-liner. I used to use Java for GUI or server stuff; now I avoid it whenever I can.

I'm the father of twins, which is a lot of fun.

I'm in the SCA; my main interest is calligraphy & illumination. My output dropped abruptly when the kids were born, of course; I've finished only two scrolls since then. As a nice overlap of scribing and geekery, I recently created a font called Isabella, based on the hand used in the Isabella Breviary (1497), and released it as open source (http://www.thibault.org/fonts/isabella/). I've since done some more fonts; the best of them is Essays 1743 (http://www.thibault.org/fonts/essays/).

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