The author is Larry Paulson - my (and I'm sure many others' on HN) Foundations of Computer Science lecturer at Cambridge back in 2009. I wonder if I still have a little credit at the front of the lecture notes (for spotting some typo or other). It's foreboding to see him writing up his "memories" like this. Being woken up into the world of functional programming (via Moscow ML) - after learning to code as a kid in JavaScript and Visual Basic 6 - was priceless. And in a way it led to my fascination with Scala, which has made the transition to Swift much easier.