Biography

He studied in Princeton University

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

, obtaining the title of Bachelor of Arts in Physics in 1990.
The same year he won the IOCCC contest, in the Best Utility category.

One of his most notable works as programmer is the reimplementation of the rc shell

Rc

rc is the command line interpreter for Version 10 Unix and Plan 9 from Bell Labs operating systems. It resembles the Bourne shell, but its syntax is somewhat simpler. It was created by Tom Duff, who is better known for an unusual C programming language construct called Duff's device.A port of the...

, from the Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

 operating system

Operating system

An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

, for UNIX-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 operating systems. Also, together with Paul Haahr, he developed the es shell

Es shell

The es shell is a command line interpreter developed by Byron Rakitzis and Paul Haahr, that uses a scripting language similar to the rc shell of the Plan 9 operating system. It is intended to provide a fully functional programming language as a Unix shell. The bulk of es' development occurred in...

, which provides a functional language, with high order functions.

Between 1996 and 1998 he studied music in the Utrecht Conservatory

Utrecht School of the Arts

The Utrecht School of the Arts is a performing arts and visual arts educational institution in Utrecht, Netherlands. The institution has 570 teachers and staff members...

, and nowadays he spends his time as a freelance flutist and fagotist.

In 2007 he went to Washington University to pursue a Master in Electrical Engineering Sciences.

Publications

• Es: A shell with higher-order functions, Paul Haahr and Byron Rakitzis, USENIX
  USENIX
  -External links:* *...
  
   Technical Conference Proceedings, Winter 1993.