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.
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Hah, +1 for HN users who attended that course in 2009 here. (I usually post on a pseudonymous account though.) I surely must know you, though I couldn't tell who you are from very briefly stalking your comments!
While we're reminiscing, I imagine you also took Concepts in Programming Languages in second year (https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1011/ConceptsPL/ ?), which (after a tour de force through all sorts of paradigms that were consigned to the fossil record for the time being) did advertise Scala pretty heavily. I found that course to be a true gem and haven't seen anything like it at any of the other universities I've passed through since then.
Still have my copy of ML for the Working Programmer, my one surviving book from back in the day (early 90s in my case).
Being hit with all that stuff from day one, fresh from a childhood of Spectrum Basic and Turbo Pascal, was a real shock to the system.
Still don't understand most of it to be honest, but it does still jar when I see the initialism used to mean Machine Learning.
Ha ha.. I don't have it anymore, but I also went through ML for the Working Programmer. At my university, some web apps were written in ML, but then our principal was Mads Tofte - He is a good guy, learned a lot from him.