Getting off the ground with this blog

My static ego (a "plain web site") has lived for many (?) years now in Amsterdam. Since January 2005

I am with Microsoft at the XML end of things. Since my official title does not sound too impressive (“Program Manager”), I practice another informal title: Grammarware engineer. I am in love with one woman (my wife, in fact), but many languages. I am going to hide the fact that Cobol is in this list because I have seen people laughing at me for that reason; I am confident about my admiration for Haskell, and so you find me rambling on purely functional mailing lists, too. Now at Microsoft, I am both intrigued and scared by the amount of functional programming that gets into the mainstream of the future. Instead of being passive about it, I am actively contributing to the LINQ project, again at the XML end of things (but in the SQL Server building).

 

What can you expect from this blog?

- I will occasionally and arbitrarily confuse C# and Haskell, if I get time.

- More importantly, I will share some insights, comments and hacks on XLinq.

- And even more importantly, I am going to ponder about typed XML programming.

 

A good example for all of these items is my latest paper “Scrap your XML-plate” which I can highly recommend J.

 

[This is an obsolete draft. Check out my POPL 2007 paper and the two XML 2006 papers instead.] 

 

I am not sure how to sign.

In Europe, I used to be called Ralf Lämmel.

Whenever, keyboards had trouble with “ä”, an expansion rule kicked in: Ralf Laemmel.

These days, I am mostly calling myself Ralf Lammel.

This has to do with the fact that the expansion rule was found to be unintuitive when I applied for my SSN.