We describe various aspects of the Al-Salam-Chihara $q$-Laguerre polynomials. These include combinatorial descriptions of the polynomials, the moments, the orthogonality relation and a combinatorial interpretation of the linearization coefficients. I
t is remarkable that the corresponding moment sequence appears also in the recent work of Postnikov and Williams on enumeration of totally positive Grassmann cells.
We start with a (q,t)-generalization of a binomial coefficient. It can be viewed as a polynomial in t that depends upon an integer q, with combinatorial interpretations when q is a positive integer, and algebraic interpretations when q is the order o
f a finite field. These (q,t)-binomial coefficients and their interpretations generalize further in two directions, one relating to column-strict tableaux and Macdonalds ``seventh variation of Schur functions, the other relating to permutation statistics and Hilbert series from the invariant theory of GL_n(F_q).
