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I’ve lately become interested in the Haskell programming language again, after a long time (eleven years!) away from the fold. During the process of thrashing about and trying to find my footing, I discovered a new module, named Data.ByteString, which makes dealing with strings in Haskell both sane and impressively fast. So I started to read the code, and whoa! There’s my name! Because it had been so long since I’d done any Haskell programming, I’d almost completely forgotten about everything that I had written, including Data.PackedString (a pale precursor of the stream-fusing beauty that is Data.ByteString). I wrote PackedString in 1994 (before Haskell acquired a half-decent module system), when I spent a summer interning for Simon Peyton Jones. It was almost a physical shock to see my name in a context that I had so thoroughly forgotten. I must have sat staring at the screen for a good 15 seconds, and even then I had to ask Don Stewart on #haskell about the connection, beause I could just not figure it out (he pointed me at Data.PackedString). I don’t know whether to be more amused by seeing my name in a chunk of code that’s far superior to my original or my own astonishment at seeing it there.