Richard P. Gabriel

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Richard P. Gabriel
Born1949
Merrimac, Massachusetts
NationalityUnited States
EducationComputer Science (Ph.D.)
Alma materNortheastern University, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University
OccupationComputer scientist
EmployerIBM
Known forCommon Lisp, Worse is Better, Maclisp, League for Programming Freedom, Lucid Inc., XEmacs
ChildrenJoseph, Mariko, Peter Gabriel
AwardsAssociation for Computing Machinery's 1998 Fellows Award, Allen Newell Award, 2004

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 introduced the phrase Worse is Better,[1] 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.

Biography[edit]

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[edit]

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.[citation needed] 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 Teaching 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[edit]

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[edit]

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,[2] Gabriel was an influential contributor to the evolution of the open source software strategy,[3] culminating in publication of the book Innovation Happens Elsewhere.[4] In 2007, he joined IBM Research as a Distinguished Engineer.

ACM[edit]

Gabriel is the recipient of Association for Computing Machinery's 1998 Fellows Award[5] 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.”[citation needed]

He was the conference chair of the 2007 OOPSLA.

Trivia[edit]

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.[citation needed]

Works[edit]

  • Gabriel, Richard P. (May 1985). Performance and Evaluation of Lisp Systems (PDF). Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press; Computer Systems Series. ISBN 9780262070935. LCCN 85-15161.
  • Gabriel, Richard P. (1996). Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community (PDF). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512123-6.
  • Gabriel, Richard P. (2002). Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things: Patterns, Poetry... (PDF). Addison-Wesley. ISBN 0-201-72183-X.
  • Gabriel, Richard P. (2005). Drive On. Hollyridge Press. ISBN 978-0-9752573-8-8.

References[edit]

  1. ^ Worse is Better. Dreamsongs.com. Accessed 2011-03-01.
  2. ^ Innovation Happens Elsewhere: About the Authors. Dreamsongs.com. Accessed 2011-03-01.
  3. ^ [Richard P. Gabriel, "The Commons as New Economy & What This Means for Research," Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development, International Workshop on, p. 10, First International Workshop on Emerging Trends in FLOSS Research and Development (FLOSS'07: ICSE Workshops 2007), 2007]
  4. ^ Innovation Happens Elsewhere: Acknowledgements. Dreamsongs.com. Accessed 2011-03-01.
  5. ^ ACM: Fellows Award / Richard P Gabriel. Acm.org. Accessed 2011-03-01.

External links[edit]

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