A physicist by education I started to program out of necessity in my mid twenties and over time software engineering became both my profession and my passion. My experience and interests are in applied computing: large, complex systems; performance-sensitive computing; signal-processing; scientific/numerical computing. My primary language is c++, although I use only a subset of the available features; I am somewhat worried about the direction c++ is taking, most of the new and proposed features do not solve any of my day-to-day needs. Recently I picked up Python and C#, I like both. I am an admirer of Anders Hejlsberg: TurboPascal, Delphi and C#/DotNet are all fine pieces of work.