Welcome to my first post as a Dobbs Code Talk blogger. In this post I briefly introduce myself and the subject of my blog: programming languages.

In the past I was a prolific blogger on Artima.com, O'Reilly, and my own site CDiggins.com. I am honored to be part of this community, but I almost feel like I'm out of my league given the level of experience and quality of writing produced by the other bloggers. Sometimes I think that the only thing that really qualifies me to be a blogger is that I have lots of opinions and a strong compulsion to share them.

I have the the distinction of being the "programming languages guru" here at Dobbs Code Talk. So what does this mean to me? It means that after many years of programming and studying language design, I am reasonably aware about what it is that I don't know about programming languages. Contrast this to something like helicopter mechanics, for which the only meaningful thing I can say is that I know nothing about it.

It is perhaps a dubious achievement to be knowledgable about the limits of your understanding, but at the same time I don't really think you can do any better. The subject of programming languages is deeply linked to a huge number of subjects in mathematics, computer science, and software engineering. For example: computability, algorithmic complexity, set and category theory, proof finding, type theory, software engineering, risk management, usability, formal language grammars, automatons, calculus, algebra, and so on. You either go deep or you go broad for a topic as big as programming languages: I chose broad.

That's enough meta-blogging for now, watch my blog space for posts related to all subjects related to programming languages. Hopefully, there'll be something for everyone. If you ever feel like talking about programming languages or would like me to blog about a particular subject dear to you, feel free to drop me a line and say hello at cdiggins@gmail.com.