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
Thanks for the article, Jeff. I've read Brian Kernighan's book and used Go for a few small-ish data munging projects, but I can't get really excited by it.
My main reason is that years of programming in Java, Groovy and Python have given me an object-oriented mentality that I find hard to abandon. Besides that, I find a few irritating details - like capitalizing a name to make it public (really, a public, export, import keyword appearing once in a file is easier to find and more descriptive), or limiting the initializer ability in the for and if statements, which forces the programmer to put stuff outside the for and if that really should be in the initializer - that surprise and disappoint me, given the illustrious pedigree of the Go designers.
But anyway, as far as non-object-oriented languages go, it's usable and an improvement (from my perspective) on many earlier efforts.
Daisuke, nice article! I must say I haven't reached the Zen realization level 6 with Go yet, let alone the nirvana of level 7, probably because I'm finding it hard to insert myself into the true Go idiom. But your article gives me some motivation to continue to explore!