Guy L. Steele, Jr.
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Guy Lewis Steele, Jr.,a.k.a. "The Great Quux", authored three books: Common Lisp: The Language; C: A Reference Manual; and The High Performance Fortran Handbook (MIT Press). He was editor of The Hacker's Dictionary, which has been revised as The New Hacker's Dictionary, edited by Eric Raymond with introduction and illustrations by Guy Steele (MIT Press). He is a co-creator of the Scheme programming language.
As a senior scientist at supercomputer company Thinking Machines, he helped to define and promote a parallel version of Lisp called *Lisp (star lisp). In 1994 he joined Sun Microsystems and was invited by Bill Joy to become a member of the Java team after the language had originally been designed, since he had a track record of writing good specifications for existing languages. In addition to the specifications of the Java programming language, at Sun Microsystems Guy Steele is responsible for research in parallel algorithms, implementation strategies, and architectural and software support. In 2005, Steele began leading a team of reseachers at Sun developing a new programming language named Fortress, a high performance language based on Fortran.
Guy Steele has published more than two dozen papers on the subject of the Lisp language and Lisp implementation(the Lambda Papers). One of his most notable contributions is the design of the programming language Scheme (together with Gerald Sussman). He also designed the original command set of Emacs and was the first one to port TeX (from WAITS to ITS). He has published papers on other subjects, including compilers, parallel processing, and constraint languages. One song he composed has been published in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (CACM) ("The Telnet Song", April 1984).
He has served on accredited standards committees X3J11 (C language) and X3J3 (Fortran) and is currently chairman of X3J13 (Common Lisp). He was also a member of the IEEE committee that produced the IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language, IEEE Std 1178-1990. He represents Sun Microsystems in the High Performance Fortran Forum, which produced the High Performance Fortran specification in May, 1993.
Guy Steele received an AB from Harvard (1975) and an SM and Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science (1977, 1980). Prior to joining Thinking Machines, he was an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.
In 1988 he received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. He was named an ACM Fellow in 1994.
He was born in Missouri.
External links
- Brief professional biography of Guy Steele (http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/~hurley/guysteele.html) at MIT.it:Guy Steele