Working With Rails

I have been writing software for over twenty-seven years using language like FORTRAN/RATFOR, C/C++, Java, CommonLisp (my long-time favorite), Scheme, Smalltalk, lots of 64-128bit microcode, PHP and now Ruby, which has become my all-time favorite. I was an early adopter of C+, using it for large projects when I it was still just a preprocessor and was only available from AT&T on a sometimes bootlegged 9-track mag tape. I went to the first C+ users conference in Sante Fe, NM where you could sit still down and have beer with Bjarne and talk about changes to the language while it was still young and malleable. I’m not trying to brag here. It’s just that I’ve been lucky in my career to be at the right place at the right time when new technologies were coming on-line to CS and there was a lot of excitement and enthusiasm about what it all could mean to the art – kind of like it is with Ruby and Rails right now.

Things that I am Proud Of

1. I was part of a team that designed and built a micro-coded new multi-processor computer. I wrote the executive and the drivers for the VAX and PDP-11. This truly represented being part of the “soul of a new machine.”
2. I wrote image reconstruction and related digital signal and image processing filters for the CT scanner industry. The algorithms had to be fast-fast-fast and be defect free since bugs could show up as pathology.
3. I wrote the first optimizing C compiler and companion simulator that could be re-targeted from a Net-list (the output of a schematic capture system) for Texas Instruments. TI sold a whole bunch of chips as a result of this technology. As a direct result of this effort QTC (the company I helped found) received over $8M in venture capital so that we could build something that we owned and could market. This was my baby.
4. I wrote an Analog Model Synthesis (CAD) tool that allowed designers to design complex analog circuits using simple graphical idioms using a 2½D GUI. For this work I was granted a patent and received EDN magazine’s Technology Product of the Year Award in 1993.
5. I spent the better part of a year living and working in Israel developing a scripting language, based on Scheme. The system worked to well that when bugs were encountered in the native application, they just simply programmed around it in Scheme. This saved many a demo from going sour and remained the language du jour for otherwise hard-core C++ programmers when they came up against a problem that they could not get working using C++ alone.
6. I wrote a backward-chaining goal-driven planning tool for Paul Allen which allowed him to remotely control his many electronic gadgets that had complex sequences of commands (think of watching a show on cable while taping another show on satellite using 4 remotes) spanning many devices. For example, he just say “Watch HBO” while on his yacht in the Mediterranean and my system would know how to power up the sat dish, aim it, route the signal to the decoder, route that signal to the AV processor, etc, etc, etc. My system made obsolete the efforts of about 50 device programmers whose job it was to continually come up with custom macros to anticipate his every whim.