Paul J. Lucas started programming on Commodore PETs at his high school. Courtesy of his parents, the first computer he owned was an Apple ][plus that he programmed in BASIC, Pascal, Fortran, and 6502 Assembly. At some point, he upgraded to a Macintosh. During his undergraduate studies, he taught himself C. He’s been programming in C (on and off) ever since. He’s also programmed in Bash, Go, Java, Perl, and Python. Of all those, C and C++ are still his favorites.
He started his career at AT&T Bell Labs in telephony, log file visualization, testing cfront (the original C++ compiler), and wrote The C++ Programmer’s Handbook. He’s also worked at NASA Ames Research Center, various start-ups, and lastly at Splunk. He holds patents on data visualization class libraries, visual log file analysis, programming language type systems, skewing of scheduled search queries, and cache-aware searching. He developed open-source projects including CHSM, a finite state automata compiler and run-time system, used by both telecommunications companies and CERN for managing complex reactive systems; and maintains cdecl, the C and C++ gibberish-to-English translator.