I wrote my first program in 1978 (FORTRAN). I’m retired now after decades of programming ending with a few years of teaching introductory courses. I’ve been through a few languages of course and have worked on a broad variety of products. But I’ve spent the past 15 years or so mostly with Java and JavaScript.

I wrote my first web page in the early 1990s when timbl offered to put content on the CERN server for anyone who felt left out. These were very early days and my work wasn’t focused on building the Web. (So I was in fact a bit naive when considering the offer.) I contacted him and he said ok but I would have to write the web page myself. So I did, and the page got published.

Distributed computing is one of my favorite personal interests and I’ve had a pet project (The High Level Logic project) that gets some of my attention from time to time; developing a high level framework (something like a very high level language) in support of mashing up independently maintained code sources into applications. It’s from an idea I first had in the early-mid 1980s when I worked as an evangelist for first gen. AI.

In support of this work, I wrote a WebSocket “server” somewhere around 2011 when the final draft of the standard was being reviewed. More recently, during my teaching years, I wrote an extremely easy to use HTTP server on Node.js that uses “JavaScript Servlets”. (Achieve) Originally designed for use in a beginning programming course, it’s developed into something that can be used professionally.

I am fanatic when it comes to using WWW standards. It’s what makes the Internet great. My interest in standards came earlier. My first assignment as an independent software consultant in the late 1980s (Yes, you could make a good living that way back then.) was to create a “toolkit” for translating other vector graphics formats into CGM (IS 8632: 1987) and then into Genigraphics format. (The system was sold to Power Point which was subsequentlly purchased by Microsoft.) This was also early days in understanding the idea of a “document”. Today, you should look at SVG for the accepted way of doing what CGM did

Now that I have plenty of free time, getting to know Solid seems to fit nicely with the other things I’m into. And I’ve finally had time to catch up on the new things in JavaScript that have appeared over the past 5 years.

I still imagine getting around to releasing V 1.0 of the High Level Logic system.