Name Brad Cox | Role Computer scientist | |
Books Object-oriented programming ; an evolutionary approach, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier Education University of Chicago, Furman University | ||
Brad Cox is a computer scientist and Ph.D. of mathematical biology known mostly for creating the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love and for his work in software engineering (specifically software reuse) and software componentry.
Contents
Oral history of brad cox
Biography
Cox received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Organic Chemistry and Mathematics from Furman University, and his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago. Among his first known software projects, he wrote a PDP-8 program for simulating clusters of neurons. He worked at the National Institutes of Health and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute before moving into the software profession.
Although Cox invented his own programming language, Objective-C, which he used in his early career, he has stated in an interview for the Masterminds of programming book that he isn't interested in programming languages but rather in software components, and he regards languages as mere tools for building and combining parts of software.
Cox is also an entrepreneur, having founded the Stepstone company together with Tom Love for releasing the first Objective-C implementation. Later, NeXT acquired Objective-C from Stepstone. Objective-C continued to be the primary programming language for writing software for Apple’s OS X and iOS.