About Myself

Anonymous (Sam?) wonders...

So the world wants to know...

Actually I doubt very few in the world want to know this.

...have you ever shipped a real commercial product ever (even better a scalable one) or are you just a play with esoteric languages complaining whiner?

The last few years I've just been playing with *agile* (not so esoteric) languages and been a complaining whiner. I've actually taken a new position where most of my time will be spent developing again, so for your benefit I may not have as much time to simply complain and whine!

But I have been developing software professionally for 20+ years, beginning when I was an undergrad CS major developing a payroll and materials management system in BASIC (not the visual kind) on an IBM 5100. I've also developed software for electronics design and simulation using PL/1, C, C++, Pascal, Mainsail (a Pascal-like language with garbage collection, etc.), and Lisp. I've developed factory automation systems in C, C++, and Lisp. I've developed conferencing systems in C++ and Smalltalk; business and web systems in Smalltalk and Java; and systems programming in C, Smalltalk, and Java. I developed a mechanism in Smalltalk that doubled the number of concurrent users for Gemstone Smalltalk systems using HTML and applet front-ends. One of the applications for this was a dispatching system developed at Florida Power and Light where the Gemstone portion of the system outlasted the IBM mainframe portion in a real production scenario. (When IBM patched their mainframe's TPC/IP stack, the Gemstone portion was reliably processing what it could, and then picked back up to full speed as usual.) I did not work on the end application, but designed and implemented the underlying mechanism.

Hardware these have run on include the aforementioned IBM 5100, IBM PC's, Macintosh, Lisp machines (Texas Instruments and Symbolics), various Unix systems (DEC, Sun, VAX, IBM, HP, perhaps others I've forgotten), the Tektronix 4406 Smalltalk workstation (which I am surprised there is not much on the web), Apollo workstations, Data General Eclipse, and something else which I probably can't mention to this day.

Have you ever shipped products that people have used or are you a washed up academic?

I have shipped many products and have never been an academic, although I may in fact be washed up. Fair questions.