Seldom without a computer of some sort since graduating from the University of British Columbia in 1978, I have been a full-time Linux user since 2005, a full-time Solaris and SunOS user from 1986 through 2005, and UNIX System V user before that.
On the technical side of things, I have spent a great deal of my career as a consultant, doing data analysis and visualization; especially spatial data analysis. I have a substantial amount of related programming experience, using C, awk, Java, Python, PostgreSQL, PostGIS and lately Groovy. I'm looking at Julia with great interest. I have also built a few desktop and web-based applications, primarily in Java and lately in Grails with lots of JavaScript on the front end and PostgreSQL as my database of choice.
Aside from that, I spend a considerable amount of time writing proposals, technical reports and - of course - stuff on https://www.opensource.com.
Authored Comments
Jim, thanks so much for writing this article. He is one of my all-time heroes (can't wait for the Marvel movie about the Bell Labs crew that saved us from the evil Multics).
Another great book of his is
The Go Programming Language
Alan A. A. Donovan · Brian W. Kernighan
Published Oct 26, 2015 in paperback and Nov 20 in e-book
Addison-Wesley; 380pp; ISBN: 978-0134190440
https://www.gopl.io/
And of course that classic Software Tools with its examples in Ratfor!
Nice comments, Anurag Gupta. In a language like Python we are quite some distance away from the machine that is executing the code "down below", and in any case typing is much less about the machine and much more about our interpretation of the results.