I am a newcomer to Plain Black, and wanted to take a few moments to share my somewhat unusual perspective on development (although it seems to be becoming a bit more mainstream these days).
I am a polyglot programmer. I'm something of a language geek, at least compared to the average industry developer. I have lost count of the number of programming languages I have worked with, or even know fairly well. If you ask me what languages I know, I usually rattle off a list of the 4 or 5 I've worked with most recently. My first few languages were of the Java/C# variety, so I developed a distaste for static typing that has to this day prevented me from learning Haskell, ML, or OCaml. I have a fondness for functional programming, but so far it's been in dialects of Lisp, Javascript, or even (horrors!) in Perl. In addition to these, I know some superset of C, x86 assembly, Ruby (somewhat), Python, a little Lua, Scheme, Clojure, and some languages I'm probably forgetting.
Learning is my greatest passion; I love working on code that teaches me things. I've only been paid to write Perl, which I learned during the first week or so of my last job. I've wanted to write a language implementation for a long time, so I've started work on a Scheme interpreter in Python that I play around with in my spare time.
Well-written code is my second passion. I continually strive for the most elegant, maintainable way to solve programming problems, and am always looking to improve my own code craftsmanship.
I look forward to working with the other folks here at Plain Black. You can find me out on IRC with the other Plain Black devs, under the username frodwith. The folks I've met so far are really cool, and I think I'll have plenty of room to learn and grow here. Here's to it.
