Daniel L. Weinreb (January 6, 1959 – September 7, 2012) was an American

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

and

programmer A programmer, computer programmer or coder is an author of computer source code someone with skill in computer programming. The professional titles Software development, ''software developer'' and Software engineering, ''software engineer' ...

, with significant work in the environment of the programming language

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

Early life

Weinreb was born on January 6, 1959, in

Brooklyn Brooklyn is a Boroughs of New York City, borough of New York City located at the westernmost end of Long Island in the New York (state), State of New York. Formerly an independent city, the borough is coextensive with Kings County, one of twelv ...

, New York, and was raised there by his parents, Herbert and Phyllis Weinreb. He had two brothers, Bill and David, and attended Saint Ann's School.

Education

Weinreb graduated from St. Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York in 1975. He attended the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) from 1975 to 1979 (starting at age 16), graduating with a B.S. in

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

and

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

, where he and Mike McMahon wrote EINE and ZWEI, text editors for MIT Lisp machines. EINE made use of the windowing system of the Lisp machine, and thus is the first

Emacs Emacs (), originally named EMACS (an acronym for "Editor Macros"), is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, s ...

written for a

graphical user interface A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such ...

(GUI). EINE was the second implementation of Emacs ever written, and the first implementation of Emacs in Lisp. Most of the notable subsequent Emacs implementations used Lisp, including

Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman ( ; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...

GNU Emacs GNU Emacs is a text editor and suite of free software tools. Its development began in 1984 by GNU Project founder Richard Stallman, based on the Emacs editor developed for Unix operating systems. GNU Emacs has been a central component of the GNU ...

James Gosling James Arthur Gosling (born 19 May 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java (programming language), Java programming language. Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of E ...

Gosmacs Gosling Emacs (often shortened to "Gosmacs" or "gmacs") is a discontinued Emacs implementation written in 1981 by James Gosling in C. Gosling initially allowed Gosling Emacs to be redistributed with no formal restrictions, as required by the "E ...

, and Bernard Greenberg's Multics Emacs.

Professional life

During 1979–1980, Weinreb worked at

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in Livermore, California, United States. Originally established in 1952, the laboratory now i ...

(LLNL) on the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

''Amber'' for the S-1

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

, more so the file system and the multiprocess

scheduler A schedule (, ) or a timetable, as a basic time-management tool, consists of a list of times at which possible tasks, events, or actions are intended to take place, or of a sequence of events in the chronological order in which such things ...

. In 1980, he cofounded

Symbolics Symbolics, Inc., is a privately held American computer software maker that acquired the assets of the former manufacturing company of the identical name and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp (programming language), Lisp sy ...

, developing software for their Lisp machine. He also participated significantly in the design of the

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S2018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperli ...

(CL). He was one of the five co-authors of the original language

specification A specification often refers to a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. A specification is often a type of technical standard. There are different types of technical or engineering specificati ...

, ''

Common Lisp the Language ''Common Lisp the Language'' is a reference book by Guy L. Steele about a set of technical standards and programming languages named Common Lisp. History Before standardizing The first edition (Digital Press, 1984; ; 465 pages) was written by Gu ...

, First Edition''. He worked on Statice, an

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of '' objects''. Objects can contain data (called fields, attributes or properties) and have actions they can perform (called procedures or methods and impleme ...

database published by Symbolics in 1988. In 1988, he cofounded

Object Design, Incorporated Object Design, Incorporated (often called ODI) was a software company founded by Daniel Weinreb in 1988 which developed and commercialized an object database called ObjectStore. Object Design was founded by several former Symbolics employees, ...

(ODI), where he was one of the architects and implementors of

ObjectStore ObjectStore is a commercial object database, a specialized type of NoSQL database designed to handle data created by applications that use object-oriented programming techniques, avoiding the object–relational mapping overhead required when ...

, a leading commercial object-oriented database management system

object database An object database or object-oriented database is a database management system in which information is represented in the form of objects as used in object-oriented programming. Object databases are different from relational databases which are ...

. It is still commercially maintained and available from

Progress Software Progress Software Corporation is an American public company that produces software for creating and deploying business applications. Founded in Burlington, Massachusetts with offices in 16 countries, the company posted revenues of $531.3 mill ...

, which bought Object Design (then eXcelon, Inc.). In 2002, he joined

BEA Systems BEA Systems, Inc. was a company that specialized in enterprise infrastructure software products, which was wholly acquired by Oracle Corporation on April 29, 2008. History BEA began as a software company, founded in 1995 and headquartered in ...

, where he was Operations, Administration, and Management Architect for

WebLogic Oracle Fusion Middleware (FMW, also known as Fusion Middleware) consists of several software products from Oracle Corporation. FMW spans multiple services, including Java EE and developer tools, integration services, business intelligence, co ...

. In 2006, he joined

ITA Software ITA Software is a travel industry software division of Google, formerly an independent company, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was founded by Jeremy Wertheimer, a computer scientist from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Co ...

, working on an

airline reservations system Airline reservation systems (ARS) are systems that allow an airline to sell their inventory (seats). It contains information on schedules and fares and contains a database of reservations (or passenger name records) and of tickets issued (if appli ...

(ARS). In 2009 Daniel Weinreb gave a Google Tech Talk about the use of

as one of the implementation languages for the airline reservation system. The video is no longer available for reasons Dan described as "kind of stupid". In 2009, he was the chair of the International Lisp Conference 2009 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Personal life

Weinreb married Cheryl Moreau in 1986 and they had a son, Adam, in 1991. Dan Weinreb died on September 7, 2012, after a year-long battle with cancer.

References

Publications

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

External links

*
Daniel Weinreb's Road to Lisp

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Weinreb, Daniel 1959 births 2012 deaths Deaths from cancer in Massachusetts MIT School of Engineering alumni American computer scientists American computer programmers Google employees Lisp (programming language) people Emacs American computer businesspeople Saint Ann's School (Brooklyn) alumni