Retired Principal Software Engineer specializing in back-end software development.
E-mail: paul@lucasmail.org
Note, however, that I am not available for advice, collaboration, consultation, jobs, recommendations, nor individual training.
Paul started programming on Commodore PETs at his high school. Courtesy of his parents, the first computer he owned was an Apple IIplus that he programmed in BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, and 6502 Assembly language. At some point, he upgraded to a Macintosh. During his undergraduate studies, he taught myself C. He's been programming in C (on and off) ever since. He's also programmed in Bash, Go, Java, Perl, and Python. Of all those, C and C++ are still his favorites.
He started his career at AT&T Bell Labs in telephony, log file visualization, testing cfront, and wrote the The C++ Programmer's Handbook (Prentice-Hall, 1992). He's also worked at NASA Ames Research Center, various start-ups, and lastly at Splunk. He holds patents on data visualization class libraries, visual log file analysis, programming language type systems, skewing of scheduled search queries, and cache-aware searching.
He developed open-source projects including CHSM, a finite state automata compiler and run-time system, used by both telecommunications companies and CERN for managing complex reactive systems; and maintains cdecl (‘‘see-deh-kull’’), the C and C++ gibberish-to-English translator.
Most recently, he's published Why Learn C (Apress, 2025).