What's not in my profile?

I used to be a huge Wirth-ian in the 1990s and spewed excellent tirades against the evils of C. Niklaus Wirth is also my "PhD grandfather" via Michael Franz at #UCIrvine.

I prefer lecturing sitting down in front of a laptop and talking while I do stuff. I very much dislike slides and prefer chalk and blackboard for things like data structures.

I got my "15 minutes of fame" served unexpectedly:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/12/students-boycott-final-challenge-professors-grading-policy-and-get
https://boingboing.net/2013/02/19/students-get-class-wide-as-by.html
https://archive.nytimes.com/economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/gaming-the-system/

But it still was fun.

I got my undergraduate degree from https://www.cs.hm.edu/ which back then was not allowed to feed into PhD programs. It's a thing in Germany: Everything is tiered and changing the tiers requires a change to the constitution of the republic (I am joking, but not really) so it takes a while. (Nowadays it would be easier to go on to a PhD from there.) The "plus" was that I spent two semesters in industry. In one I quickly out-FORTRAN-ed my boss, in the other I learned C++ from Stroustrup in two weeks while riding the bus. Beat that Ivy League!

I grew up on #c64 #basic and #mos6502 (well, #mos6510 I guess) assembly, went on to #m68k assembly, #gfabasic and lots of #oberon. Of course I was dabbling in #modula2, #prolog, #scheme, and more. Then it was mostly whatever I needed so #fortran, #cpp, #java, lots of #python, lots more #c, lots more #arm and #x86 assembly, some #golang, some #ocaml, some #csharp even if you can believe it. Nowadays it's pretty much #c all day with chunks of #python and bits of #rust now and then. And chunks of #bash too.

(Proudly self-plagiarized off of a few 2023/2024 posts from my previous account.) #introduction #SorryItsLate