A retrospective talk on five decades of practice of computing.

Guy L. Steele Jr. (A.B., Harvard, 1975; S.M., MIT, 1977; Ph.D., MIT, 1980) is a Software Architect at Oracle Labs. He has also taught at Carnegie-Mellon University and worked for Tartan Laboratories and Sun Microsystems Laboratories. He is author or co-author of reference manuals or specifications for Scheme, Common Lisp, C, High Performance Fortran, Java, and JavaScript.

His publications and patents cover compilers, language design, garbage collection, microprocessor design, parallel algorithms, floating-point arithmetic, network design, machine-learning algorithms, and pseudorandom number generators. Honors include: ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, ACM Fellow, AAAI Fellow, ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award, member of National Academy of Engineering, fellow of American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and IEEE Fellow. He is well-known for his 1998 ACM OOPSLA talk Growing a Language. His most recent talk is It’s Time for a New Old Language.