Thursday, October 9, 2008

Warren Teitelman will speak at Lisp50


Warren Teitelman
Dr. Warren Teitelman received his B.S. in Mathematics from CalTech in 1962, and his M.S. in 1963 and Ph.D. in 1966 from M.I.T., there being no program in computer science at M.I.T. at that time. He joined Bolt Beranek and Newman in 1966, where, as DARPA principal investigator, he was responsible for the design, implementation, and support of BBN-Lisp. He left BBN in 1972 to join Xerox PARC where he continued as DARPA principal investigator now responsible for Interlisp. Interlisp pioneered many of the concepts and functionality of modern IDEs (integrated development environment).

For this work, he received the ACM Software Systems Award for 1993: "For pioneering work in programming environments that integrated source-language debuggers, fully compatible integrated interpreter/compiler, automatic change management, structure-based editing, logging facilities. Interactive graphics, and analysis/profiling tools in the Interlisp System."

Dr. Teitelman left Xerox Parc in 1984, and joined Sun Microsystems where he was a Distinguished Engineer and Director of Window Systems, responsible for SunWindows, Sunview, Open Windows, XView, Open Look Toolkit, News, X11-News server, The News Toolkit. In 1990, he became Sun's Director of Multimedia.

He left Sun in 1992, and after brief stints at Rational Corporation - Director of C++ Development Environment, Lucid Corporation - Vice President of Engineering, and Caere Corporation - Vice President of Engineering, he joined BayStone Software in 1995 as VP of Engineering and CTO. BayStone was acquired by Remedy Corporation in 1998. He joined Google in 2003.

Transforming Lisp into a Programming Environment
Dr. Teitelman was first introduced to Lisp during his graduate studies at M.I.T. He wrote the software portion of his dissertation using Lisp 1.5. on MIT's CTSS (Compatible Time Sharing System). As a result of that experience, he became interested in transforming Lisp from a programming language into a programming environment. His talk will describe this passage which covered the years 1966 - 1980, and saw the introduction of many innovative features, such as history, spelling correction and undo, analysis and profiling tools, integrated interpreter and compiler, the first Lisp-based client-server window system, and more.

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