His work on formal grammars and linguistic theory is amazing.

Since high school, I have been interested in languages, human and computer, and he is the closest thing to an authority on both that I know of.

I first heard his name way back in the 1990s, I think, when I mentioned to another programmer I was interested in lots of computer languages. I have skimmed some of his books on formal grammars at the bookstore.

I didn’t realize he had any interest in politics until a few months ago. A paper he wrote was in the new, after reading it I read his bibliography and Wikipedia entry, just to make sure it was the same guy.

He seems very passionate and knowledgeable. He seems to like to put disparate pieces of a huge, complex, abstract puzzle together. I guess that is why he was so successful as a formal linguistics scientist.

I just read half of a huge article he wrote last night, and then I was surprised to see his name again this evening. This time, it was on 43people’s top-ranked “interesting people” list by its users. Googling his name to find his home page and Wikipedia entry, I found out he had been blogged about just hours earlier at the Washington Post website.

Oddly, I haven’t read much about his politics. I gather that his POV spans several generations and covers several eras of American industrialization. Probably the latest phase, in some ways, he helped make possible. We sure are not just punching variables and numbers into computers anymore. There are a lot of language skills involved too.

I would love to hear how he developed his theories on language and where his big breakthroughs came from.