The three chief virtues of a programmer are: Laziness, Impatience and Hubris.
– Larry Wall – Programming Perl

My first exposure to programming was in the 4th grade using the Apple IIe. We were tasked with typing in some examples in LOGO that would draw graphics on the screen. Squares, circles, triangles of various types; these all bored me to tears. So I set out to do a five pointed star. Once conquered I then tried to print them out in a pattern, and then that pattern onto other patterns. My school district was lucky enough to have a mechanical device that would plot the instructions on butcher paper and my design was chosen to be the one produced.

Suffice to say: I love programming. It’s a fun and interesting challenge and I like working with my hands to make things.

I have specific pages for BASH, Python, and PHP.

Perl

Years ago perl was more popular than it is today. I list it mainly for historic reasons. I’ve dealt with it mostly in terms of CGI scripts and data mangling.

C/C++

I’ve slogged through a few intro computer science classes before I settled on a history degree. I know enough C/C++ to be dangerous. Most of my experience comes from managing build environments using make and the RPM Package Manager to build custom binaries for servers.

Ruby

Ruby is something I’d like to see become popular. My brief experiences with Ruby on Rails have impressed me. The idea of frameworks saving your from repeated tasks (and repeated debugging headaches) is a compelling one. When I am Emperor of Everything™ I will require unit testing on everything.