My name is Wolfgang Thaller. I live in Graz, Austria (that's in Europe - no kangaroos here). I am 21 years old (born in 1981), and writing computer programs has been my hobby for more than half of my life.

I released my first shareware program, DeadEnd, in December of 1993. Check out the other sections of this web site for the current versions of my programs.

I have represented Austria at the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) four times (1996 - 1999), winning two silver and two gold medals.

Most of my programs are written in C++. I like it because it is a language that allows me to write all kinds of programs, without restricting my programming style too much - it allows everything from the lowest level of abstraction up to pretty high levels of abstraction.
Sometimes I also use Java, the over-hyped language of the nineties. I like it's cross-platform nature and it's simpleness. It does away with many of the weaknesses of C++, but unfortunately, it adds many more by omitting features which are considered "unsafe", "too difficult to use" or just plain "evil". Some of those "evil" features are in fact very helpful for writing well-structured, maintainable programs - so how can they be "evil"?
Haskell, on the other hand, is a really modern language. While it tends to tie knots in the brain of programmers that use it, it offers a much higher level of abstraction than any "conventional" language - leading to much shorter and simpler code for complicated problems. One thing that is particularily remarkable: once the compiler has accepted a piece of code without reporting any errors, the chances are (in my experience) very high that the code actually works - much higher than with other languages I've used. My 3D rendering program VOP is written almost entirely in Haskell (more than 10000 lines of Haskell code and less than 1000 lines of C++ code).

3D computer graphics has always fascinated me. I used to write small programs (all unfinished and forgotten) using Apple's QuickDraw 3D, and now I'm using OpenGL. I also enjoy using the freeware raytracer POV-Ray to create virtual worlds all of my own - maybe I'll publish some of them here once.

You can contact me at wolfgang.thaller@gmx.net; feel free to write to me in German, English, French or Latin.