From: Rick DeNatale Date: 2007-07-21T01:20:44+09:00 Subject: Re: Backgrounds before Ruby (was Re: Not a question, not really On 7/17/07, Ilan Berci wrote: > M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > > 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. Just the highlights In College (BSEE/CS UConn '74) Work scope, learning everything I could. Fortran II 1620 Assembler Language PL/I Fortran IV Lisp 1.5 Snobol PDP-5/8 assembler PDP-11 assembler probably others I've gotten too old to remember. IBM internship Work stuff, doing data analysis to support a planning department. APL/360 and PL/I IBM Workscope, applications and systems development on mainframes PL/I, PL/S, PL/AS (These were IBM internal languages which had the same kind of relationship to PL/I that C has to Algol, i.e. higher level syntax than Assembler, but still 'close to the metal.') Workscope: research assignment to explore OO technology ca 1981) C ClassC (a C dialect with Smalltalk methods/messaging concepts added, my brainchild and used within IBM for a few years, kind of like Objective-C with different syntax, Brad Cox and I only found out about each others work too late ). which led to workscope as an OO evangelist within IBM SMALLTALK!!!!! (I was the secretary of the ANSI standards committee, wrote the early prototype of Visualage/Smalltalk, and developed the Visualage/Smalltalk distributed feature) Java - worked on VisualAge MicroEdition IDE (which was the immediate precursor to Eclipse Hobby Apple II basic - yeah I know Pascal Object Pascal and MacApp perl bash playing a bit with Haskell for contrast to Ruby. RUBY!!!!!!! In retirement and consulting Ruby and Rails -- Rick DeNatale My blog on Ruby http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/