Simon Peyton Jones (born 18 January 1958) is a British computer scientist who researches the

implementation Implementation is the realization of an application, or execution of a plan, idea, model, design, specification, standard, algorithm, or policy. Industry-specific definitions Computer science In computer science, an implementation is a real ...

and

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

of functional programming languages, particularly lazy

functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that ...

Education

Peyton Jones graduated from

Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...

with a BSc in Electrical Sciences in 1979 and went on to complete the

Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science Diploma in Computer Science, originally known as the Diploma in Numerical Analysis and Automatic Computing, was a conversion course in computer science offered by the University of Cambridge. It is equivalent to a master's degree in present-day nom ...

in 1980. He never did a PhD.

Career and research

Peyton Jones worked in industry for two years before serving as a lecturer at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

and, from 1990 to 1998, as a

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

at the

University of Glasgow , image = UofG Coat of Arms.png , image_size = 150px , caption = Coat of arms Flag , latin_name = Universitas Glasguensis , motto = la, Via, Veritas, Vita , ...

. From 1998 to 2021 he worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in

Cambridge, England Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became ...

. Since 2021 he has worked at Epic Games as an engineering fellow. He is a major contributor to the design of the

Haskell Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming lan ...

programming language, and a lead developer of the

Glasgow Haskell Compiler The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) is an open-source native code compiler for the functional programming language Haskell. It provides a cross-platform environment for the writing and testing of Haskell code and it supports numerous extensions, ...

(GHC). He is also co-creator of the programming language, designed for intermediate program representation between the language-specific front-end of a compiler and a general-purpose back-end code generator and optimiser. C-- is used in GHC. He was also a major contributor to the 1999 book ''Cybernauts Awake'', which explored the ethical and spiritual implications of the Internet. Peyton Jones chairs the Computing At School (CAS) group, an organisation which aims to promote the teaching of computer science at school. Following these efforts, in 2019 he was appointed chair of the newly founded UK National Centre for Computing Education. Jones has played a vital role in the development of new

Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation or computation capabilities, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for App ...

features since 2003, when he published a paper on user-defined functions. In 2021, anonymous functions and let expressions were made available in the

Office 365 Microsoft 365 is a product family of productivity software, collaboration and cloud-based services owned by Microsoft. It encompasses online services such as Outlook.com, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, programs formerly marketed under the name ...

version of Excel as a beta feature.

Honours and awards

In 2004 he was inducted as a

Fellow A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context. In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements. Within the context of higher education ...

of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to functional programming languages. In 2011 he received membership in the

Academia Europaea The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of Europea ...

. In 2011, he and Simon Marlow were awarded the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for their work on GHC. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow in 2013 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Kent in 2017. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016 One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: and a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (DFBCS) in 2017. Peyton Jones was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to education and computer science.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Peyton Jones, Simon 1958 births Living people Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge British computer scientists Academics of University College London Academics of the University of Glasgow Functional programming Programming language researchers Microsoft employees Members of Academia Europaea Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of the British Computer Society Officers of the Order of the British Empire