Richard Gabriel
Encyclopedia
Richard P. Gabriel is an expert on 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 incorporated the phrase Worse is Better
, 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.
in northeastern Massachusetts
to two dairy farmers. He was nearly accepted to MIT
and Harvard
, but an argument with a teacher ended those prospects, and he ended up going to Northeastern University
, where he earned a B. A. in Mathematics
(1967–1972).
, but after two years the lab fell through due to general apathy. 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 Teacher's 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
.
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 machine
s 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
.
(1994–1995), and then a consultant, for, among others, Aspen Smallworks, before joining Sun Microsystems
. As a Distinguished Engineer at Sun, 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 as a Distinguished Engineer.
's 1998 Fellows Award 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.”
He was the conference chair of the 2007 OOPSLA
.
, Drive On, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005.
Lisp programming language
Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older...
(and especially Common Lisp
Common Lisp
Common Lisp, commonly abbreviated CL, is a dialect of the Lisp programming language, published in ANSI standard document ANSI INCITS 226-1994 , . From the ANSI Common Lisp standard the Common Lisp HyperSpec has been derived for use with web browsers...
) in computing. His best known work was a 1990 essay “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big”, which incorporated the phrase Worse is Better
Worse is better
Worse is better, also called the New Jersey style, was conceived by Richard P. Gabriel to describe the dynamics of software acceptance, but it has broader application. The idea is that quality does not necessarily increase with functionality. There is a point where less functionality is a...
, and his set of Lisp benchmarks
Benchmark (computing)
In computing, a benchmark is the act of running a computer program, a set of programs, or other operations, in order to assess the relative performance of an object, normally by running a number of standard tests and trials against it...
(the "Gabriel Benchmarks"), published in 1985 as Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems, which became a standard way of benchmarking Lisp implementations.
Biography
He was born in 1949, in the town of MerrimacMerrimac, Massachusetts
Merrimac is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, and on the southeastern border of New Hampshire, approximately northeast of Boston and west of the Atlantic Ocean. It is situated along the north bank of the Merrimack River in the Merrimack Valley. The population was 6,504 in 2008...
in northeastern Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...
to two dairy farmers. He was nearly accepted to MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...
and Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
, but an argument with a teacher ended those prospects, and he ended up going to Northeastern University
Northeastern University, Boston
Northeastern University , is a private, secular, coeducational research university in Boston, Massachusetts. Northeastern has eight colleges and offers undergraduate majors in 65 departments...
, where he earned a B. A. in Mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
(1967–1972).
Studying
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 IllinoisUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...
, but after two years the lab fell through due to general apathy. 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
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
; during that period (1975–1981), he served as a Teacher's Assistant to John McCarthy
John McCarthy (computer scientist)
John McCarthy was an American computer scientist and cognitive scientist. He coined the term "artificial intelligence" , invented the Lisp programming language and was highly influential in the early development of AI.McCarthy also influenced other areas of computing such as time sharing systems...
, the founder of Lisp; he ported Maclisp
Maclisp
MACLISP is a dialect of the Lisp programming language. It originated at MIT's Project MAC in the late 1960s and was based on Lisp 1.5. Richard Greenblatt was the main developer of the original codebase for the PDP-6; Jonl White was responsible for its later maintenance and development...
from its native ITS
Incompatible Timesharing System
ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System , was an early, revolutionary, and influential time-sharing operating system from MIT; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC.In addition to being technically influential ITS, the...
to WAITS
WAITS
WAITS was a heavily-modified variant of Digital Equipment Corporation's Monitor operating system for the PDP-6 and PDP-10 mainframe computers, used at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory up until 1990; the mainframe computer it ran on also went by the name of "SAIL".There was never an...
; he earned a PhD. in Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
(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
League for Programming Freedom
League for Programming Freedom 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...
.
PosDoc
After he earned a PhD, he continued to work on AIArtificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
projects for McCarthy, although his thesis advisor was Terry Winograd
Terry Winograd
Terry Allen Winograd is an American professor of computer science at Stanford University, and co-director of the Stanford Human-Computer Interaction Group...
. He eventually began working for Lawrence Livermore National Labs
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory , just outside Livermore, California, is a Federally Funded Research and Development Center founded by the University of California in 1952...
, 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
Lucid Inc.
Lucid Incorporated was a software development company founded by Richard P. Gabriel in 1984 which went bankrupt in 1994.-Beginnings:Gabriel had been working for Lawrence Livermore National Labs on a computer hardware project called "S1", the first incarnation of which used a CISC processor...
.
Gabriel was at various times the President and Chairman of Lucid Inc. The product the company shipped was an integrated Lisp IDE
Integrated development environment
An integrated development environment is a software application that provides comprehensive facilities to computer programmers for software development...
for Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
’ RISC hardware architecture. This sidestepped the principal failure of Lisp machine
Lisp machine
Lisp machines were general-purpose computers designed to efficiently run Lisp as their main software language. In a sense, they were the first commercial single-user workstations...
s 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
AI winter
In the history of artificial intelligence, an AI winter is a period of reduced funding and interest in artificial intelligence research. The process of hype, disappointment and funding cuts are common in many emerging technologies , but the problem has been particularly acute for AI...
) to an IDE for C++
C++
C++ is a statically typed, free-form, multi-paradigm, compiled, general-purpose programming language. It is regarded as an intermediate-level language, as it comprises a combination of both high-level and low-level language features. It was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup starting in 1979 at Bell...
. A core component of the IDE was Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman
Richard Matthew Stallman , often shortened to rms,"'Richard Stallman' is just my mundane name; you can call me 'rms'"|last= Stallman|first= Richard|date= N.D.|work=Richard Stallman's homepage...
’s version of Emacs
Emacs
Emacs is a class of text editors, usually characterized by their extensibility. GNU Emacs has over 1,000 commands. It also allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work.Development began in the mid-1970s and continues actively...
, 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
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...
. One of his hires was another notable programmer, Jamie W. Zawinski
Jamie Zawinski
Jamie Zawinski , commonly known as jwz, is a former professional American computer programmer responsible for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the Netscape Navigator web browser...
.
Own business and open source
After Gabriel left Lucid, Inc. for good, he became a Vice President of Development for Parc Place SystemsParc Place Systems
Software spinoff from Xerox PARC, founded to commercialize the Smalltalk programming language and related technology.- Timeline of ParcPlace Systems :1989 - Founded by Adele Goldberg and others from PARC...
(1994–1995), and then a consultant, for, among others, Aspen Smallworks, before joining Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...
. As a Distinguished Engineer at Sun, 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 as a Distinguished Engineer.
ACM
Gabriel is the recipient of Association for Computing MachineryAssociation for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...
's 1998 Fellows Award and the 2004 Allen Newell
Allen Newell
Allen Newell 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 Department of Psychology...
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.”
He was the conference chair of the 2007 OOPSLA
OOPSLA
OOPSLA 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...
.
Trivia
In 1998 he received his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College. He has published poems in some literary journals. His chapbookChapbook
A chapbook is a pocket-sized booklet. The term chap-book was formalized by bibliophiles of the 19th century, as a variety of ephemera , popular or folk literature. It includes many kinds of printed material such as pamphlets, political and religious tracts, nursery rhymes, poetry, folk tales,...
, Drive On, was published by Hollyridge Press in 2005.