About — Sergey Denisov

I grew up and studied in a mid-sized Russian city in what Russians call the Far East. It was much closer to China than to Moscow.
I studied C++ during my first year at university using a book on Borland C++, though I cannot recall the author now. I remember struggling with the three-part for loop for about a week, but once it clicked, everything else felt easy.
Later, I learned Java and built a chat application, because chat applications were popular at the time. I was not trying to turn it into anything serious; I just wanted to see whether I could build one too. It used applets and AWT, and it had its share of multithreading bugs.
In my twenties, Perl was my favorite language. It was also disappointing to watch Perl 6 arrive so late that it never really gained traction.
Programming languages have always excited me. I studied many of them over the years. In general most of them are very similar, with Haskell standing out and Prolog remaining a category of its own.
I am currently learning Spanish, and it turns out learning a third language is much easier than learning a second.
At university I also wrote in assembly language for both x86 and an embedded RISC controller. Later, it was a revelation to see how much of that work could be done in C without losing much, and how directly C maps to machine instructions.
My degree was in computers and systems design, but the Russian chip industry had largely collapsed long before I graduated, so I eventually had to choose between hardware repair work and software. Software was the one I genuinely enjoyed.
I was a PhD student for a while, though I did not finish the program, and taught database and networking courses at my alma mater for two semesters.

Background