Little in life gives me such joy as programming a computer. Little in life produces such awe in me as Donald Knuth's TeX language---so simple, so logical, so powerful.

Nowadays when I speak of 'programming' I'm talking about programming TeX. I started with Basic---when you started the Atari computer I had, you were not in DOS, or anything like that, but in Basic. In fact, that's why I had an Atari in the first place. I didn't like having to load GWBasic in the Epsons of the time, although GWBasic was great for me in that I actually had the manuals, so I could actually challenge myself beyond a certain limit.

Then came the IBM conquest. DBase III+, what a creation! And, certainly, QuickBasic. It was great. So many programs I did for fun in that little language... At around the same time, early 90's my uncle Rodrigo had brought TeX to Colombia, and I had had a first taste of---and infatuation with---it. But TeX for me was still essentially an application, not a programming language. It was QuickBasic that allowed me to talk directly to the computer.

And then I got to know VisualBasic. So great! I worked for a while for a small but promising software company, Kleytran Ltd. in Bogotá, and we used VisualBasic. They got me the program itself, and the manual. And so later that year I wrote my first big program, one that played checkers. I cannot describe the feeling of playing a first game against it---it must come close to what watching your own children grow feels like.

My program beat me. But then for a long while there was no occasion for me to program. In fact, when I came to Pitt in 2001, I learned that we were entitled to a free new version of VisualBasic. So I went for it! To my surprise, the system had in those years completely changed in nature... It wouldn't run my old programs, and I didn't know how to start making them compatible. Now I had no manual---and no time, I was in graduate school!

But graduate school confronted me with paper typesetting. I of course used TeX, not Word (once you make the change there is no reverse). And, lucky me, TeX was not designed for music, or even for the humanities. I had to start going to its lower levels, to get things done as I was required in school.

Then it got me: in TeX I found my niche. Today I'm working on TeXmuse, by far the biggest project I have ever engaged, a software for 'professional music typesetting.' I wish I knew other languages---I wish, rather, there was occasion for me to learn and use them. But TeX is so beautiful, I could just live all my life with it, and nothing else.