Burn In 11: Damian Conway

This is the twelfth entry in the O'Reilly Radar series about how alpha geeks got into computers. Damian Conway is the evil genius (and court jester) of Perl 5 and one of the designers of Perl 6 (along with that famous developer of Unix tools, Larry Wall). He's consistently one of the best-rated speakers and tutors at OSCON. He could also benchpress Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Damian Conway's Story

I was never really interested in computers until I was 18. Oh, sure, I'd programmed calculators to do my math homework for me, dabbled with Basic programs on the School's microcomputers, and messed around with a simple electronics kit, but I never had the bug as a teenager.

That changed on about the second day I was at University.

I had enrolled in a Science/Engineering double degree, intending to become an electrical engineer. Computer Science was part of the curriculum. I was curious about it but had no idea what it actually entailed. So I went along to my first Computer Science tutorial and was amazed to discover that the first class to have access to the CS departments awesome new VAX machines: massively powerful 6 MHz processors, running multiuser VMS and directly accessible via real 80x24 VDU terminals and keyboards instead of tedious punchcard decks!

We were thrown in the deep end. Our professor, the legendary Chris Wallace, believed that you weren't a Computer Scientist if you couldn't build a machine from the ground up: transistors, circuit diagrams, CPU architecture, microcode, assembler, operating system, languages. So our first class was to implement a self-bootstrapping assembler program.

I loved it. It was pure magic, in the strictest sense: you arranged a series of arcane incantations and that somehow changed the world. The sheer elegance of using a language whose first command was "load another command then execute it" was entrancing. The notion that commands were just data, and that data could be transmuted into commands struck me very hard. The world changed. I had always been good with words, and suddenly anything seemed possible. You could transform mere words into real actions, just by arranging other mere words!

I suspect that the Engineering half of my degrees was doomed that very afternoon (though I still went on to complete all but my final year of it). I had been translated into a new universe, a universe of pure language, in which my potential was limited only by my imagination, my eloquence, and my self-discipline. I could never go back.