tchrist's user avatar
tchrist's user avatar
tchrist's user avatar
tchrist
Moderator
  • Member for 13 years, 4 months
  • Last seen this week
Stats
134,660
reputation
27.2m
reached
2,383
answers
44
questions
Loading…
About
profile for tchrist on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites http://stackexchange.com/users/flair/216196.png

Moderator ♦ on [English Language and Usage](http://english.stackexchange.com) and Pro Tem ♦ on [Portuguese Language](http://portuguese.stackexchange.com). I can most easily be reached in real time by pinging me in the [ELU chatroom](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/95/english-language-usage).

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 <[email protected]>, 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.

49
gold badges
371
silver badges
594
bronze badges
2,245
Score
315
Posts
13
Posts %
1,988
Score
229
Posts
9
Posts %
1,529
Score
199
Posts
8
Posts %
1,275
Score
237
Posts
10
Posts %
1,259
Score
163
Posts
7
Posts %
973
Score
179
Posts
7
Posts %
Top posts
View all questions and answers