I'm Dave.
I've been using UNIX since 1983, when I was a student at Carleton College and got access (by modem!) to St. Olaf College's VAX running 4.x BSD and PDP-11 running UNIX v7. In addition to those machines, I've used UNIX on small x86 systems like the AT&T 6300 and 7300, Pegasus systems, AT&T 3B systems, supercomputers (I was a developer of ETA System V for the ETA-10 supercomputer), mainframes (I was a user of AIX/370 and a developer of AIX/ESA, an OSF/1 port to the IBM 390/ESA line (think 3090 model)), workstations and servers (developer of AIX for IBM RS/6000 and Power lines, developer of Solaris). I've also used FreeBSD, which is actually UNIX, and Linux, which is not but looks a lot like it.
I've been a C programmer since 1983, when I learned C on VAX/VMS and used the Whitesmith C compiler. I used C in my current job as an AIX developer. I've dabbled in C++ and am not a huge fan.
I was a huge fan of Tcl for several years.
I did some machine learning work using Python, porting machine learning frameworks to IBM Power systems. I've also used Python for various projects. I guess today I'd prefer to use Python over other languages when possible.
While I'm comfortable with vi
(note I said vi
and not vim
) I'm more of an Emacs guy. I've used Emacs since 1984 when I first tried it on a VAX/11-780 running 4.1c BSD UNIX. Emacs has improved tons since then, and benefits greatly from the more capable systems we have today. My "goto" packages in Emacs are org, Gnus, elfeed, and various programming modes.