In 1990 I started work at a tiny company run by people out of the mainframe data-processing world (apparently). Over the next year or so I created what was more

In 1990 I started work at a tiny company run by people out of the mainframe data-processing world (apparently). Over the next year or so I created what was more or less Scheme with an infix syntax, plus a DSL for data formats. It happened gradually, starting with the DSL -- before that they'd write custom little programs in C to convert from a new client's format, etc. Then hey, why don't I hook up an arithmetic evaluator so we can filter records without another custom program? (They'd evaluated microcomputer database sytems as unsuitable.) And so on, until they had a real scripting language in a couple thousand lines of C. Nowadays you'd be kind of nuts to do this, but it was mostly a great success, and the gradual insinuation of this way of doing things was much easier to sell (from a guy right out of school) than bringing in a whole new language like Perl, if I could even be sure Perl would be right for them -- I'd just seen it listed in ads in Dr. Dobb's Journal. None of us were on the net. It was a different world. The fun exception to the success was the time I tweaked something and broke the garbage collector, and we only found out when a job went back to the client with completely bogus results. An educational moment for me. Years later at JPL I helped with a new Scheme dialect. It was partly in response to the politics described in "Lisp at JPL" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2212211 -- we could say "this is actually a C program, see" -- but the language design was quite nice, IMHO. I can say that without backpatting because it was mostly done before I came in. Influenced by ML and Dylan; a shame it never was released.