Guy L. Steele Jr. believes that it should not be the programmer’s job to think about parallelism, but languages should provide ways to transparently run tasks in parallel. This requires a new approach in building languages supporting algorithms built on independence and build-and-conquer principles rather than on linear decomposition of problems.
Guy L. Steele heads the Sun Programming Language Research Group. He's held positions at Carnegie-Mellon University, Tartan Laboratories, and Thinking Machines Corporation and is the author or co-author of several books on languages (Common Lisp, C, High Performance Fortran, the Java Language Specification) as well as "The Hacker's Dictionary" (also known on the Internet as the "Jargon File").
In this phone interview that took place in front of an audience at OOPSLA 2008, Guy Steele spins a yarn with John McCarthy, the father of Lisp, attempting to find out some details surrounding the language inception in the 50’ and its later evolution.
Sun Fellow Guy Steele is interviewed by Floyd Marinescu, co-founder of InfoQ, and Bobby Norton of ThoughtWorks. Guy works for the Programming Language Research Group. The interview focuses on programming languages, the lessons to be learned from the past and what to expect from the future.
