While I love Perl, i also have a special place in my heart for Ada 95 and Erlang. I read textbooks on obsolete langauges for fun (I have books on CLU, SNOBOL and Assembly for IBM 360/370s on the shelf behind me).

I tend to be a very paranoid programmer, and I think that web application design can learn alot from real-time system application design (especially when it comes to stability and reliability). Why shouldn't your web application code be as stable and reliable as the code used to monitor a nuclear reactor? Or a telephone exchange?

In my spare time, I work for a small NYC consultancy where I build medium to large scale OO mod_perl applications. I have begun to release several modules onto CPAN which are part of a larger framework we use internally. You can find them here, any comments questions or suggestions are welcome.

On two occasions I have been asked by members of Parliament, "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

      — Charles Babbage, 1792-1871

Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

      — Christopher Alexander on Design Patterns