Daniel L. Weinreb (January 6, 1959 – September 7, 2012) was an American computer scientist and programmer, with significant work in the environment of the programming language Lisp.

Early life

Weinreb was born on January 6, 1959, in

Brooklyn Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...

, 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 land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

(MIT) from 1975 to 1979 (starting at age 16), graduating with a

B.S. A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Science was the University ...

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

and electrical engineering, where he and Mike McMahon wrote EINE and ZWEI, text editors for MIT

Lisp machine Lisp machines are general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software and programming language, usually via hardware support. They are an example of a high-level language computer architecture, and in a sense, they ...

s. EINE made use of the

windowing system In computing, a windowing system (or window system) is software that manages separately different parts of display screens. It is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) which implements the WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) paradigm fo ...

of the Lisp machine, and thus is the first Emacs written for a

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inst ...

(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 free software text editor. It was created 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 project and a flagship project of ...

James Gosling James Gosling (born May 19, 1955) is a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the founder and lead designer behind the Java programming language. Gosling was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2004 for the conceptio ...

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 Bernard S. Greenberg is a programmer and computer scientist, known for his work on Multics and the Lisp machine. Projects In 1978, Greenberg implemented Multics EmacsBernard S. Greenberg. ''Multics Emacs: The History, Design and Implementati ...

Multics Emacs Multics Emacs is an early implementation of the Emacs text editor. It was written in Maclisp by Bernard Greenberg at Honeywell's Cambridge Information Systems Lab in 1978, as a successor to the original 1976 TECO implementation of Emacs and a ...

Professional life

During 1979–1980, Weinreb worked at

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) is a federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States. The lab was originally established as the University of California Radiation Laboratory, Livermore Branch in 1952 in response ...

(LLNL) on the

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

''Amber'' for the S-1

supercomputer A supercomputer is a 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 instructions ...

, more so the

file system In computing, file system or filesystem (often abbreviated to fs) is a method and data structure that the operating system uses to control how data is stored and retrieved. Without a file system, data placed in a storage medium would be one larg ...

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 are i ...

. In 1980, he cofounded

Symbolics Symbolics was a computer manufacturer Symbolics, Inc., and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the Open Genera Lisp system and the Macsyma computer algebra system.

, developing software for their

. He also participated significantly in the design of the

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

Common Lisp Common Lisp (CL) is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ''ANSI INCITS 226-1994 (S20018)'' (formerly ''X3.226-1994 (R1999)''). The Common Lisp HyperSpec, a hyperlinked HTML version, has been derived fro ...

(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 Guy ...

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

object-oriented Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming paradigm based on the concept of "objects", which can contain data and code. The data is in the form of fields (often known as attributes or ''properties''), and the code is in the form of pro ...

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, i ...

(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 to Relational Mapping overhead required whe ...

, 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 a ...

. It is still commercially maintained and available from

Progress Software Progress Software Corporation (Progress) is an American public company that offers software for creating and deploying business applications. Headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts with offices in 16 countries, the company posted revenues ...

, 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 WebLogic Server is a Java EE application server currently developed by Oracle Corporation. Oracle acquired WebLogic Server when it purchased BEA Systems in 2008. Application Server versions * WebLogic Server 14c (14.1.1) - March 30, 2020 ...

. 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 (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. 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