Prior to ActiveState's acquisition by Sophos, Ascher was the technical lead for ActiveState's Python initiatives and for the Komodo integrated development environment (IDE), which was one of the first professional applications built on top of the Mozilla codebase by a team outside of the Netscape/Mozilla team.  Komodo is a commercial IDE which has been on the market for several years, and ships on Windows, Linux, Solaris, and soon Mac OS X.

Ascher is a key figure in the Python community, and a director of the Python Software Foundation. He is a Python trainer and frequent speaker at software conferences, including the O'Reilly Open Source Convention. Ascher co-authored Learning Python and co-edited The Python Cookbook, both published by O'Reilly; helped develop and document the Numeric and PyOpenGL Python extensions.

Prior to joining ActiveState, Ascher was a Python consultant in areas including telemedicine, high-performance graphics, scientific computing, web/database interfaces, and Windows CE. He has worked for Apple Computer, Neuron Data, Brown University, and Distributed Data Systems.

Ascher holds a B.Sc. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, both from Brown University. His interests include scientific computing, advanced user interface and object-oriented programming techniques.

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