David A. Moon is a

programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

and

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, known for his work on the

Lisp programming language Lisp (historically LISP) is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in 1960, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common us ...

, as co-author of the

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 ...

text editor, as the inventor of ephemeral garbage collection, and as one of the designers of the

Dylan programming language Dylan is a multi-paradigm programming language that includes support for functional and object-oriented programming (OOP), and is dynamic and reflective while providing a programming model designed to support generating efficient machine code, in ...

Guy L. Steele Jr. Guy Lewis Steele Jr. (; born October 2, 1954) is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages and technical standards. Biography Steele was born in Missouri ...

and

Richard P. Gabriel Richard P. Gabriel (born 1949) is an American computer scientist known for his work in computing related to the programming language Lisp, and especially Common Lisp. His best known work was a 1990 essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Bi ...

(1993) name him as a leader of the

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 ...

movement and describe him as "a seductively powerful thinker, quiet and often insulting, whose arguments are almost impossible to refute".

Work

Maclisp, a variant of Lisp developed at 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) by Richard Greenblatt in the late 1960s, originally ran on the

PDP-6 The PDP-6, short for Programmed Data Processor model 6, is a computer developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) during 1963 and first delivered in the summer of 1964. It was an expansion of DEC's existing 18-bit systems to use a 36-bit da ...

and

PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...

computers made by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...

. In the early 1970s, Moon headed a project at MIT that reimplemented Maclisp on a different kind of computer, the

Honeywell 6180 The Honeywell 6000 series computers were rebadged versions of General Electric's 600-series mainframes manufactured by Honeywell International, Inc. from 1970 to 1989. Honeywell acquired the line when it purchased GE's computer division in 1970 ...

running the

Multics Multics ("Multiplexed Information and Computing Service") is an influential early time-sharing operating system based on the concept of a single-level memory.Dennis M. Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Communications of t ...

operating system. The

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primarily used for programs that ...

that he developed, NCOMPLR, became the "standard against which all other Lisp compilers were measured". As part of this project, he also wrote what became the standard manual for Maclisp more generally, titled the ''MacLISP Reference Manual'' but often called the ''Moonual''.. Reprinted in . Moon was one of the original members of Greenblatt's project to develop the 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, the ...

, beginning in 1974. In 1976, with Steele, he wrote the first ( TECO-based) version of the

text editor, and in 1978 with

Daniel Weinreb 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 Brookl ...

he coauthored the manual for the Lisp Machine, known as the ''chine nual''. With Howard Cannon, he developed

Flavors Flavor or flavour is either the sensory perception of taste or smell, or a flavoring in food that produces such perception. Flavor or flavour may also refer to: Science *Flavors (programming language), an early object-oriented extension to Lis ...

, a system for doing

object-oriented programming 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 pr ...

with

multiple inheritance Multiple inheritance is a feature of some object-oriented computer programming languages in which an object or class can inherit features from more than one parent object or parent class. It is distinct from single inheritance, where an object or ...

on the Lisp Machine. As part of the Lisp Machine project, he also invented ephemeral garbage collection, an advance that led to the widespread use of continuously-operating garbage collection systems in Lisp more generally. When

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.

was founded in 1980 to commercialize the Lisp Machine, he became one of its founders. He continued to develop new hardware and software at Symbolics, and was listed as a Symbolics Fellow in 1989, but left the company in 1990 to join a project to develop a new

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 ...

. He also made important contributions to the

standardization Standardization or standardisation is the process of implementing and developing technical standards based on the consensus of different parties that include firms, users, interest groups, standards organizations and governments. Standardization ...

. Later, he worked for

Apple Computer Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company b ...

, where he became one of "the primary contributors to the language design" for the

References

External links

Programming Language for Old Timers
David A. Moon, updated April 2012
Lunar Programming Language
David A. Moon, updated 2020 {{DEFAULTSORT:Moon, David A. American computer scientists Programming language researchers Computer programmers Living people Lisp (programming language) people Year of birth missing (living people)