Moderator ♦ on English Language and Usage and Pro Tem ♦ on Portuguese Language. I can most easily be reached in real time by pinging me in the ELU chatroom.

I’m Tom Christiansen, co-author of Programming Perl and Perl Cookbook from O’Reilly. I work for Grant Street Group, who are always looking to hire more Perl programmers. I can (sometimes) be reached via email at <tchrist@perl.com>, but that address is heavily spam-filtered so just because you sent me something doesn’t guarantee that I’ll’ve read it. I’ve lived in Colorado for the last quarter century, but have previously lived abroad in Spain and England. I try to spend as much time as I can in the Colorado mountains.

I’ve been doing Unix and C programming since the early 1980s. My programming interests include high-level languages, Unicode, regexes, and operating systems. My old O’Reilly bio from ages ago mutters various ancient things about me, and some folks have gone and put up a silly Wikipedia page about me, too. As a kid I lived down the street from Gary Gygax of Dungeons and Dragons fame, and worked for TSR throughout high school. I have ancient undergraduate degrees in Spanish and in Computer Science, plus a graduate degree in compsci focusing on operating systems design and in natural language processing. I’ve studied Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Latin, and German, along with a smattering of related languages thrown in.

The maxim that “If you haven’t lost track of how many languages you’ve learned, you haven’t learned enough of them yet” applies to both programming languages and natural languages alike.