Edward G. Nilges

Edward G. Nilges published Build Your Own .Net Language after a thirty year career as a software developer and educator, working for companies and organizations including Princeton University and Bell-Northern Research. At Princeton, he was honored to assist Nobelist John Nash: at Bell-Northern Research he was responsible for internal compiler development for the SL/I language.

Nilges has published on technology since 1976. An early discovery, made simultaneously with hundreds of other practitioners, was the fact that creating tools to do a job was both more fun and more productive than doing many of the dirty jobs that exist in the so-called real world. For example, when called upon to unsnarl an odious Cobol program that was supposed to bill users for complex PBX usage and did not, Nilges successfully persuaded his company to let him simulate the architecture of the switch in Cobol.

Some of these war stories appear in Build Your Own.

Today, however, Nilges is rather fed up with programming and programmers, although he still uses .Net C Sharp with enthusiasm and is learning F Sharp. Instead, he is a full time teacher with a huge number of students in China, ranging from small children to adults. He prefers at times the honesty and directness of small children to some of the utter nonsense he saw in the computer industry.

As spinoza1111 on the Internet, Nilges has a louche reputation because his writing style and dislike of bullying tends to get him into flame wars. These days he is sharpening his poetic skills for his teaching by replying, in some threads, exclusively in verse form.

Nilges has two adult children and lives today in Hong Kong, on an offshore island.

Nilges blogs at www.spinoza1111.wordpress.com.