Biographies (was: OT: Beauty of programming languages)

[David Kastrup]

    Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse
    oculis meis vidi in ampulle pendere, et cum
    illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις;
    respondebat illa: άποθανεΐν θέλω.

[I saw myself with my own eyes the Cumaean Sibyl hanging in a bottle,
and when the boys said to her "Sibyl, what's your desire?" she answered
them "to die is my desire", a quote from the Satyricon most well-known
from the starting lines of T.S.Eliot's poem "The Waste Land"]

When granted a wish by Apollon, the Sibyl of Cumis, one of his
priestesses and seers, asked for eternal life.  Not having asked for
eternal youth or health as well, she eventually withered and shrank
until she would fit in a bottle, never able to die.

Age: 50

Blessed with great analytical talents but without the matching stamina
to engage them with anything that does not interest me, I haven't been
able to do any serious mental work that isn't fun.  An early attempt to
escape the problems from depending on unreliable gifts by doing an
apprenticeship in a bakery was shortlived since my body engaged in its
own version of obsessive compulsiveness by turning allergic against most
of anything to be found in a bakery within half a year, a fate that the
physicians predicted to be rather likely for most work of my hands.  So
I took up Electrical Engineering and managed to finish a diploma with
the help of coeds (which consisted in dragging me to practice sessions
where I "helped" them figure out the stuff from lectures that flummoxed
them, and with organizing call services so that I would not miss
deadlines and exams).  A later PhD never saw the completion of the
thesis, actually sort of a pity as the work was pretty novel.

The ability to pull through and complete stuff tends to be rather
important in programming jobs, so my career ended up very spotty.  The
last few years, I have spent living off the donations of various
LilyPond users and programmers, a somewhat embarrassing endeavor as I
often get locked up in less productive phases and don't communicate well
(it turns out that medication making me more productive at the same time
makes me completely unbearable and the other way round, and the vitally
necessary blood pressure medication makes stuff more difficult, so I
just stay off the psychopharmaceutics as there is no direction in which
they would be unilaterally helpful).  Since I haven't properly
maintained "customer relations" for the last few years (another
"tedious" task), at the current point of time my "income" does not cover
the costs of living in spite of several high-profile LilyPond figures
supporting me with sums that do not reflect our relative merits.

Living in a small town in Germany on the premises of my girl friend's
riding school (another venture that's not particularly good at matching
the bills), I spend most of my time at the computer, most of the time
working on something LilyPond related.

With a computing background starting with punched cards, a computer with
various self-built extensions and programs (I could only start using
CP/M after I've written my own boot loader and BIOS), I am pretty good
at understanding low-level programming problems.

At the same time, it offends my sense of design when implementation
details leak into a system such as LilyPond, so much of my work is
invested in making programming models work out cleanly and transparently
and making "naive expectations" match the actual behavior by changing
the behavior rather than the expectations where it makes sense.

I've been playing violin from young age, added guitar to the mix, have
sung in various choirs (a natural bass-baritone, I've sung either alto
or high tenor in the last years as my falsetto is the best developed
part of my voice and I prefer staying mostly above the break) and have
taken up accordion a few years ago (as finger-style guitar was a
mismatch in carrying power for chansonette performances).

I've recently made Emacs understand Midi input but found that I just
don't have the time and focus to work on bringing LilyPond's Emacs mode
into the 21st century.  Which is a real pity as the current code base
(not yet generally available) is quite nice for entering material but
then breaks down in usability for doing line-wrapping, quick entering of
durations and other editing stuff.

So the number of unfinished projects and loose ends is constantly
growing for me in spite of doing LilyPond full time already, and
consequently my bad conscience on not getting stuff done is also a
pretty constant fixture, making every moment equally bad for asking for
support of my work.

I probably share the problem of a lot of programmers of free software:
the time working on the program does not leave a lot of time for working
_with_ the program, so it's still important to get feedback from other
more arduous users.  Preferably without scaring them away forever.

-- 
David Kastrup