Just a few tidbits about me, Brian Beckman. I'm easy to find. I'm a physicist (PhD, Princeton, 1982), who worked in Astronomy, Astrophysics, and Relativity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, from 1982 to 1992. I partnered with David Jefferson on the Time Warp Operating System from 1984 through 1989. I have been dabbling in programming languages since the early 1970's, mostly on the side of practical applications. I found Scheme in the early 1980's, however, and made a few contributions and hacks. I got very comfortable with implementing compilers and interpreters and have made a slightly underground career putting lightweight implementations in all kinds of interesting places, like scientific data systems and operating-system kernels. I've also written some articles on the physics of racing cars, just as a hobby. Since 1992 I've worked at Microsoft, almost always one of the first two or three to found some project or another, specifically BBT, which is now Phoenix, Public-key security, MTS, CLR, Biztalk, tire physics for video games, and now, back to languages, on Visual Basic via SQL Server and LINQ. Feels like home, actually.
I grew up in Hollywood, CA, where my whole family was in show-biz. No one can understand how I ended up in science and technology.