Name Richard Gabriel Role Computer scientist | Organizations founded Lucid Inc. | |
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Education Warren Wilson College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Northeastern University, Stanford University Music group Gary Puckett & The Union Gap (1969 – 1971) Books Patterns of software, Innovation Happens Elsewher, Writers' Workshops & the Wor, Drive on (the Hollyridg Similar People Guy L Steele - Jr, Daniel Weinreb, Scott Fahlman, Kerry Chater, Ginni Rometty | ||
richard p gabriel the beginning of writers workshop
Richard P. Gabriel (born 1949) is an American computer scientist who is known for his work related to the Lisp programming language (and especially Common Lisp) in computing. His best known work was a 1990 essay “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big”, which incorporated the phrase Worse is Better, and his set of Lisp benchmarks (the "Gabriel Benchmarks"), published in 1985 as Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems, which became a standard way of benchmarking Lisp implementations.
Contents
- richard p gabriel the beginning of writers workshop
- Biography
- Studying
- Postdoc
- Own business and open source
- ACM
- Trivia
- Works
- References
Biography
He was born in 1949, in the town of Merrimac in northeastern Massachusetts to two dairy farmers. He studied at Northeastern University, where he earned a B. A. in Mathematics (1967–1972). Currently he resides in Redwood City, California with his wife, Jo. He has a son named Joseph, and a daughter named Mariko, a Doctor of Physical Therapy in Los Altos, California.
Studying
Subsequently, he pursued graduate studies in mathematics at MIT, from 1972–73; he was tapped by Patrick Winston to become a permanent member of the AI Lab at MIT, but funding difficulties made it impossible to retain him. Gabriel tried to start up, with Dave Waltz, an AI Lab at the University of Illinois, but after two years the lab fell through due to general apathy. Gabriel did in this time period manage to earn an MS in Mathematics however (1973–1975).
Because of some of his mathematical work, Gabriel was then admitted to Stanford University; during that period (1975–1981), he served as a Teacher's Assistant to John McCarthy, the founder of Lisp; he ported Maclisp from its native ITS to WAITS; he earned a PhD. in Computer Science (on the topic of natural language generation); and he and his wife Kathy had a son. Around this time period, he became a spokesperson for the League for Programming Freedom.
Postdoc
After he earned a PhD, he continued to work on AI projects for McCarthy, although his thesis advisor was Terry Winograd. He eventually began working for Lawrence Livermore National Labs, where he recruited a number of the researchers and programmers for a company he founded in 1984 (and would leave in 1992), and would survive until 1994, Lucid, Incorporated.
Gabriel was at various times the President and Chairman of Lucid Inc. The product the company shipped was an integrated Lisp IDE for Sun Microsystems’ RISC hardware architecture. This sidestepped the principal failure of Lisp machines by, in essence, rewriting the Lisp machine IDE for use on a more cost-effective and less moribund architecture. During this time period, Gabriel married his second wife, and had a daughter; he later divorced his second wife in 1993.
Eventually Lucid's focus shifted (during the AI Winter) to an IDE for C++. A core component of the IDE was Richard Stallman’s version of Emacs, GNU Emacs. GNU Emacs was not up to Lucid’s needs, however, and several Lucid programmers were assigned to help develop GNU Emacs. Friction arose between the programmers and Stallman over how to handle GUI issues, and Lucid forked; thus they were primarily responsible for the birth of what would come to be called XEmacs. One of his hires was another notable programmer, Jamie W. Zawinski.
Own business and open source
After Gabriel left Lucid, Inc. for good, he became a Vice President of Development for ParcPlace Systems (1994–1995), and then a consultant, for, among others, Aspen Smallworks, before joining Sun Microsystems. As a Distinguished Engineer at Sun, Gabriel was an influential contributor to the evolution of the open source software strategy, culminating in publication of the book Innovation Happens Elsewhere. In 2007, he joined IBM Research as a Distinguished Engineer.
ACM
Gabriel is the recipient of Association for Computing Machinery's 1998 Fellows Award and the 2004 Allen Newell Award. The citation reads: “For innovations not only on fundamental issues in programming languages and software design but also on the interaction between computer science and other disciplines, notably architecture and poetry.”
He was the conference chair of the 2007 OOPSLA.
Trivia
In 1998 he received his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. He has published poems in some literary journals. His chapbook, Drive On, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005.