My background is in linguistics (mainly syntax, semantics, morphology, and typology). As part of my linguistics degree I learned how to program (Pascal) in the early 1980s. In the mid-1980s Prolog became a popular language in Artificial Intelligence circles, and I started using that to program some linguistic things.
Over the years I drifted into different areas of book production -- typesetting, editing, copy-editing, indexing. Some of this work can be tedious and repetitive, and I started to write scripts to relieve me of that tedium and to automate the repetitions. I used WordPerfect a lot, and fortunately WP was very well scriptable using a powerful script language which was in essence Turbo Pascal. Later, when I started using InDesign, I learned JavaScript to automate all kinds of recurrent tasks.
I am based in Lancaster, England. You can contact me .