Richard P. Gabriel (born 1949) is an American computer scientist known for his work in computing related to the programming language

Lisp A lisp is a speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech. Types * A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lispin ...

, and especially

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 fr ...

. His best known work was a 1990 essay "Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big", which introduced the phrase ''

Worse is Better Worse is better (also called the New Jersey style) is a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in an essay of the same name to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increa ...

'', and his set of benchmarks for Lisp, termed ''Gabriel Benchmarks'', published in 1985 as ''Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems''. These became a standard way to benchmark Lisp implementations.

Biography

He was born in 1949, in the town of Merrimac in northeastern

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut Massachusett_writing_systems.html" ;"title="nowiki/> məhswatʃəwiːsət.html" ;"title="Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət">Massachusett writing systems">məhswatʃəwiːsət'' En ...

to two dairy farmers. He studied at

Northeastern University Northeastern University (NU) is a private research university with its main campus in Boston. Established in 1898, the university offers undergraduate and graduate programs on its main campus as well as satellite campuses in Charlotte, North Ca ...

, Boston, where he earned a B.A. in

mathematics Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...

(1967–1972). , 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

Subsequently, he pursued graduate studies in mathematics at MIT, from 1972 to 1973; he was tapped by

Patrick Winston Patrick Henry Winston (February 5, 1943 – July 19, 2019) was an American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Winston was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997, succ ...

to become a permanent member of the

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech ...

(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 at Urbana–Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Un ...

, but after two years the lab fell through due to general apathy. During this time, from 1973 to 1975, Gabriel managed to earn an MS in mathematics. Because of some of his mathematical work, Gabriel was then admitted to

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...

; during that time (1975–1981), he served as a

teaching assistant A teaching assistant or teacher's aide (TA) or education assistant (EA) or team teacher (TT) is an individual who assists a teacher with instructional responsibilities. TAs include ''graduate teaching assistants'' (GTAs), who are graduate stud ...

to John McCarthy, the founder of Lisp; he ported Maclisp from its native

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

, the

Incompatible Timesharing System Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) is a time-sharing operating system developed principally by the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, with help from Project MAC. The name is the jocular complement of the MIT Compatible Time-Sharing Sy ...

(ITS) to

WAITS WAITS was a heavily modified variant of Digital Equipment Corporation's Monitor operating system (later renamed to, and better known as, "TOPS-10") for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 mainframe computers, used at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laborat ...

. He earned a PhD in

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 Applied science, practical discipli ...

(on the topic of natural language generation); and he and his wife Kathy had a son. Around this time, he became a spokesperson for the

League for Programming Freedom League for Programming Freedom (LPF) was founded in 1989 by Richard Stallman to unite free software developers as well as developers of proprietary software to fight against software patents and the extension of the scope of copyright. Their l ...

Postdoctoral work

After earning a PhD, he continued to work on AI projects for McCarthy, although his thesis advisor was

Terry Winograd Terry Allen Winograd (born February 24, 1946) is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human–Computer Interaction Group. He is known within the philosophy of mind and artificial intel ...

. He eventually began working for

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 ...

, where he recruited several of the researchers and programmers for a company, Lucid, Incorporated, he founded in 1984 and would leave in 1992. It survived until 1994. Gabriel was at various times the President and Chairman of Lucid Inc. The product the company shipped was a Lisp

integrated development environment An integrated development environment (IDE) is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development. An IDE normally consists of at least a source code editor, build automation tools ...

(IDE) for

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

’

reduced instruction set computer In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set comp ...

(RISC) hardware architecture named

SPARC SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture originally developed by Sun Microsystems. Its design was strongly influenced by the experimental Berkeley RISC system develope ...

. This sidestepped the main failure of

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 by, in essence, rewriting the Lisp machine IDE for use on a more cost-effective and less moribund architecture. During this time, 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 In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research.C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

. A core component of the IDE was

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 ...

’s version of

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, ...

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 ...

. 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

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, ins ...

(GUI) issues, and Lucid forked Emacs, and thus became mainly responsible for the birth of what would come to be called

XEmacs XEmacs is a graphical- and console-based text editor which runs on almost any Unix-like operating system as well as Microsoft Windows. XEmacs is a fork, based on a version of GNU Emacs from the late 1980s. Any user can download, use, and modify X ...

. One of his hires was another notable programmer, Jamie W. Zawinski.

Own business and open-source software

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

as a Distinguished Engineer. There, Gabriel was an influential contributor to the evolution of the open source software strategy, culminating in publication of the book ''Innovation Happens Elsewhere''. In 2007, he joined

IBM Research IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research or ...

as a Distinguished Engineer.

Association for Computing Machinery

Gabriel has received the

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

's (ACM) 1998 Fellows Award, and its 2004 ACM-AAAI

Allen Newell Allen Newell (March 19, 1927 – July 19, 1992) was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND Corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Depart ...

Award. The citation reads: “For innovations in programming languages and software design, and promoting the interaction between computer science and other disciplines, notably architecture and poetry.” He was

chairman The chairperson, also chairman, chairwoman or chair, is the presiding officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office, who is typically elected or appointed by members of the group ...

of the Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (

OOPSLA OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications) is an annual ACM research conference. OOPSLA mainly takes place in the United States, while the sister conference of OOPSLA, ECOOP, is typically held in Europe. It is ope ...

) conference in 2007.

Poetry

In 1998 he received his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. He has published poems in some literary journals. His

chapbook A chapbook is a small publication of up to about 40 pages, sometimes bound with a saddle stitch. In early modern Europe a chapbook was a type of printed street literature. Produced cheaply, chapbooks were commonly small, paper-covered bookle ...

, ''Drive On'', was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005.

Works

* * * *

References

External links

*
The ACM Newell Award citation

Richard Gabriel interview on Lisp
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gabriel, Richard P. 1949 births Living people People from Merrimac, Massachusetts Lisp (programming language) people Artificial intelligence researchers American computer businesspeople American male poets Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni University of Illinois alumni Stanford University School of Engineering alumni Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Northeastern University alumni Sun Microsystems people IBM employees