Moving Online
Welcome to my blog! I’ll be using this space to write about languages, software, and cognition.
I’ve been writing software professionally for twenty years now. When I was in high school in the early eighties, I worked with William Denman on a video game, Pogo Joe, for the Commodore 64. At the time, we were innovative in hiring a visual artist (Michael Haire) to create art for the game, and a musician (Steven Baumrucker) to write music. The novely of this division of labor seems quaint in this era of vast production teams, like reading the credits for an early silent movie in the single digits, but the way to partition creative enterprise among multiple talents is something that each generation of technology seems to need to rediscover and customize. I’ll come back to this later.
I’ve gone back and forth since then between working on 2D computer graphics (at Apple Computer, Method Software, and my previous company AlphaMask, whose software is now used in the OpenWave mobile phone software platform) and computer language design and implementation (also at Apple Computer and Method, and at Linguomotors where I designed a language for describing natural-language grammars). In my current position, as Chief Software Architect at Laszlo Systems, these come together: I am responsible for LZX, a domain-specific language for writing rich internet applications. I’ll have a lot more to say about that later too.
I direct most of my time towards my work at Laszlo, and my family. In between these, I intend to update this blog every week or so.