From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-07-18T00:32:46+09:00
Subject: Backgrounds before Ruby (was Re: Not a question, not really news either)

Sharon Phillips wrote:
>> BTW my age >> 30 ;)
> 
> This would make an interesting thread in itself - what people's
> backgrounds were before Ruby, and what sort of spread of work people are
> doing currently.
> 
> 

Well, there's another thread going on about this, but I don't have time
to type in the whole enchilada right now. :) But *immediately* before
Ruby, my main languages were Perl and R -- Perl for extracting data from
various text and log files and in some cases capturing raw data and in
some cases analyzing said data, and R for analysis and graphics. That's
still the way I do my day job, with the addition of SQL and RDBMSs SQL
Server and PostgreSQL. That's mostly because we don't have any other
Ruby programmers and I have a few thousand lines of my own Perl that
needs to be maintained.

But at home, I've pretty much abandoned Perl for Ruby, and do hard core
numerical work in R. The other language I do a lot of is Lisp/Scheme,
because of its usage in algorithmic composition and synthesis of music.
A strong number four is Forth. I do almost no programming in C or Java
and none in any BASIC, Pascal, C++, Python, PHP, or Lua. About the only
one out of that list that appeals to me is Lua, and I'm also learning
Erlang. I have no desire to get into Haskell or OCaml.

The "spread" of work at home includes computational finance, algorithmic
composition and synthesis of music, Linux capacity planning, performance
modeling, and, of course, beta testing all the open source tools for all
of the above. :)