Brian Marick was first exposed to the functional style in 1983, when the accident of knowing a little bit of Lisp tossed him into the job of technical lead on a project to port Common Lisp to a now-defunct computer architecture. That led him to a reading spree about all things Lisp, the language from which the functional style arguably originated. He’s been a language geek ever since, despite making most of his living as a software process consultant. He’s the author of the popular Midje testing library for Clojure and has written books (Everyday Scripting with Ruby, Programming Cocoa with Ruby, and Functional Programming for the Object-Oriented Programmer). The two books in progress are An Outsider's Guide to Statically Typed Functional Programming and Lenses for the Mere Mortal.