Rocky asks the question “What languages and language families have you been competent in during your career?” and provides his own list. Here’s mine, in order, as I remember it:

1. BASIC (IBM-5100, a precursor to the IBM PC)
2. BASIC (TRS-80 Model III)
3. APL (IBM-5100)
4. AppleBASIC (Apple ][+ and Apple ][e)
5. UCSD Pascal (IBM PC)
6. Unix shell scripting (not sure the machine)
7. C (ditto)
8. Turbo Pascal (IBM PC)
9. GBBS Pro BASIC (a custom BBS language, Apple ][e)
10. Scheme (Mac)
11. C++ (IBM PC)
12. Haskell (Sun)
13. Visual BASIC 1.0 to present day (Windows & .NET)
14. SQL (Access & SQL Server)
15. Java (Windows)
16. MSIL (.NET)
17. C# (.NET)

And there is a small smattering of experience with other languages, but no significant programming experience. Broadly, this breaks down to the following families:

1. BASIC
2. Pascal
3. C
4. Functional languages like Scheme, Haskell, etc.
5. Other

I’ll also add that the entry for “APL” is really a joke. I started programming on IBM-5100s over at Duke University. The 5100 had the distinction of having a switch on the front panel marked “BASIC/APL”. Depending on which position the switch was in, that’s the language you used when the machine booted up. Somehow, my friend Tom and I came into possession of some mag tapes (which is what the 5100 used for storage) with a bunch of games written for the 5100, including an adventure game written in APL. I seem to remember really wanting to learn how to modify the adventure game and so I set about learning APL. Unfortunately, I was probaby 11 years old at the time and had nowhere near the necessary mathematical foundations to be able to understand the language, so the whole enterprise was a bust. So Tom and I fell back to writing an adventure game in BASIC. I think I still have a printout of “Escape from Carr Building” somewhere around here…

Updated 02/17/05: How could I forget SQL?

Apparently it’s the 100th anniversary of Ayn Rand’s birth, so for a brief period of time the media spotlight is shining again on the founder of Objectivism. Interestingly, there is a way in which Ayn Rand was tangentially involved in the creation of the precursor to this blog. When I received my brand-spanking new 300 baud modem for my birthday way back when, there were no BBSes in my hometown. This led to many long-distance phone bills calling places like Norfolk, VA, which made my parents oh-so-happy. Within a few months, thankfully, some local ones opened up. Most of them were the usual run-of-the-mill (i.e. boring) BBSes, but one of them had an extremely active political discussion group. Being 13 and somewhat naive, I dove into the discussion with my proto-socialist views and started duking it out with all involved. Two of the participants, who went by the names Darkshot and Cardinal Richardson, were dyed-in-the-wool libertarians who were very big on Ms. Rand (and were also usually the most interesting people to argue with). After debating for a few months, Darkshot apparently decided that although I was completely wrongheaded in my thinking, I was intelligent enough to be saved. So he took it upon himself to send me a copy of Atlas Shrugged (and some other books, I think, but I forget which ones).

When I went off to summer camp that year, I took the book with me and ended up reading it straight through. I have to say that it was probably one of the most entertaining books that I’ve ever read – it’s sort of like a comic book in fiction form. A bit of mystery, some really good good guys, some really bad bad guys and the end of the world – what could be better? It didn’t turn me into an Objectivist as hoped, but it did help sharpen my own views on things. Sadly, Darkshot passed away a few years ago but the book still has a sentimental place on my shelf. (I later tried reading The Fountainhead, but I found that it lacked the zip of Atlas Shrugged.)

The whole point of this is that in many ways the fact that, at the tender age of 13, I could go online and argue politics with adults and be taken seriously was a seriously formative experience. (As they say, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.) The egalitarian nature of online discussion had, I think, a lot to do with my desire to run my own BBS and helped spark my interest in online communities that continues to this day. So, thanks, Ayn, and happy birthday!

(As a footnote: Atlas Shrugged also holds the distinctive honor of being the only book that I’ve finished where I didn’t read the whole book. Those of you who’ve read the book know what I’m talking about. I can still distinctly remember getting about 3 pages into Galt’s diatribe before I thought “How long does this thing go on?” and started flipping ahead. When I realized it was, like, 40 pages, that was it…)

It’s mid-year review time again, and this year I’m resolving to do my review by the date that it’s actually due instead of when I usually do it, which is maybe two days before the actual review discussion. I’m generally positive about the review process but, I have to say, the part that gets old the longer you work here is the “Top 3 Strengths and Weaknesses” section. Back in the “old days,” when I had only been at the company, say, three years, this section was actually a very useful opportunity for me to reflect on what I did well and what I could improve on at a more general level. For example, in 1995, a new weakness showed up on my list – delegation – that reflected my move towards owning more areas in the product and beginning to have some management responsibilities. That was a good opportunity to think about why I had issues with delegation and what I could do about it, above and beyond the more targeted goals that I had for the next year.

But, c’mon. This is my 13th mid-year review and I’m running out of things to say. It’s not that I don’t have strengths and weaknesses to talk about, it’s just that they looks suspiciously like last year’s strengths and weaknesses. And the ones from the year before that. In some sense, over the course of 13 years I’ve managed to work my way through the easy weaknesses and now am engaged in the long twilight struggle against my more intractible weaknesses. I mean, I expect that I’m going to be working on my weakness concerning “dealing with ambiguity” for the forseeable future – I’ve improved a lot in the last year, and I expect to keep improving, but this is the kind of thing that is as much a part of my personality as anything else. Over the course of, say, the next ten years of my life I expect it to continue to improve, but it’s probably going to sit there on my “strengths and weaknesses” list for most of those years (assuming I’m still at Microsoft in 10 years, you never know…).

So this year I’m probably going to end up just copying last year’s list, but I’m not feeling particularly good about it. Nobody likes to feel like they’ve plateaued. So I’m choosing to view it as a sign of maturity. Yeah, right. I guess we’ll see what I come up with next year…

So Andrea and I were talking on Friday about learning to cook and, in particular, how I used to really drive her nuts with stupid questions when I was taking my first culinary steps in the kitchen. Now, when I say “stupid questions,” I mean really stupid questions not “emperor’s new clothes” kind of stupid questions. The latter kind of stupid questions are understandable and have a certain aura of respectability. For example, while the question “Hey, honey, this recipe says that I need to ‘julienne’ the carrots. What does that mean?” might seem like a stupid question to someone who already knows their way around a kitchen, for the novice it’s a perfectly understandable question. My wife was always more than happy to answer those sorts of questions (provided that she knew the answer, of course…).

No, the stupid questions that drove her nuts were ones along the lines of “Honey, the recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of cooking oil. Where’s the cooking oil?” Questions that, even in my novice state, I should have been able to answer easily if I had just stopped and spent five seconds thinking about it. I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t seen her get the oil out of the cabinet a hundred times. Heck, it’s not like I couldn’t have, through the process of elimination, figured out what cabinet it was in. I was just having a momentary brain lapse, one that occurs less frequently now that: a) I know my way around the kitchen, and b) my wife’s standard answer was something along the lines of “Well, have you looked for the cooking oil?”

The point of the conversation, ultimately, was that no matter how hard one tries it’s sometimes impossible to avoid asking stupid questions like this. The best we can do is draw up a little social contract: I, the undersigned, do solemnly agree to think before I ask a question so as to minimize the chance of asking a stupid question; you, the other undersigned, do solemnly agree to not call me an idiot when I do ask a stupid question, understanding that such things do, occasionally, happen. As long as each of us keeps up our side of the bargain, everyone gets along just fine.

I was reminded of this conversation today when, in response to a technical problem I’m having, I sent out an email to a large email alias describing my problem and asking if anyone was aware of it. About 30 seconds later, I got responses from several people (including Dare) pointing out that my exact problem had been discussed four days ago on the exact same alias. Fortunately, everyone was very nice about it and no one said anything to the effect of “here’s the answer, you moron.” As they say: sometimes you’re the windshield, sometimes you’re the bug…

(As a side note, the one indispensible aid I have found in my quest for culinary mastery is the updated The Joy of Cooking. Besides having lots of good receipes, that thing has saved my rear more times than I care to think. Highly recommended.)