Simon Peyton Jones Explained

Simon Peyton Jones
Birth Date:1958 1, df=yes
Birth Place:South Africa
Citizenship:British
Alma Mater:University of Cambridge (BSc, Dipl.)
Known For:Glasgow Haskell Compiler
C--
Prizes:ACM Fellow (2004)

Simon Peyton Jones (born 18 January 1958) is a British computer scientist who researches the implementation and applications of functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional programming.

Education

Peyton Jones graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Bachelor of Science degree[1] in Electrical Sciences in 1979. During this time he was an undergraduate student of Trinity College, Cambridge, and subsequently went on to complete the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science in 1980. He never did a PhD.[2] [3]

Career and research

Peyton Jones worked in industry for two years before serving as a lecturer at University College London and, from 1990 to 1998, as a professor at the University of Glasgow.[4] From 1998 to 2021 he worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.[4] [5] [6] Since 2021 he has worked at Epic Games as an engineering fellow.[7]

He is a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language,[8] and a lead developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC).[9] He is also co-creator of the programming language, designed for intermediate program representation between the language-specific front-end of a compiler and a general-purpose back-end code generator and optimiser. C-- is used in GHC.[10] [11] [12]

He was also a major contributor to the 1999 book Cybernauts Awake,[13] which explored the ethical and spiritual implications of the Internet.

Peyton Jones chairs the Computing At School (CAS) group, an organisation which aims to promote the teaching of computer science at school. Following these efforts, in 2019 he was appointed chair of the newly founded UK National Centre for Computing Education.[14]

Peyton Jones has played a vital role in the development of new Microsoft Excel features since 2003, when he published a paper on user-defined functions.[15] In 2021, anonymous functions and let expressions were made available in the Office 365 version of Excel as a beta feature.[16]

Honours and awards

In 2004 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to functional programming languages.[17] In 2011 he was awarded membership in the Academia Europaea (MAE).[18]

In 2011, he and Simon Marlow were awarded the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for their work on GHC.[19]

He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow in 2013[20] and honorary doctorates from the University of Kent and University of Bath in 2017.[21]

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016[22] and a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (DFBCS) in 2017.[23]

He received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2016.

Peyton Jones was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to education and computer science.[24] He also became a Distinguished Affiliate Scholar at Pembroke College Cambridge[25] and a Distinguished Honorary Fellow at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.[26]

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Simon Peyton Jones . archivesit.org.uk . 10 December 2022.
  2. Book: Seibel . Peter . Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming . 2009 . Apress . 978-1-4302-1948-4 . 10 December 2022.
  3. Web site: Yang . Jean . Interview with Simon Peyton-Jones . People of Programming Languages . 10 December 2022.
  4. Web site: Simon . Peyton Jones. Microsoft Research . Simon Peyton-Jones - Microsoft Research. 6 April 2011 . Simon Peyton Jones . https://web.archive.org/web/20160524042854/http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/simonpj/ . 24 May 2016.
  5. Web site: GHC developer Simon Peyton Jones on working for, gasp!, Microsoft. Bresnick. Julie. 3 July 2001. linux.com. live. https://web.archive.org/web/20200109122122/https://www.linux.com/news/ghc-developer-simon-peyton-jones-working-gasp-microsoft/. 9 January 2020.
  6. Web site: Ancient, but still having fun. Simon. Peyton Jones . 18 January 2008 . Simon Peyton Jones. haskel@haskel.org.
  7. Web site: An Epic future for SPJ . discourse.haskell.org. 5 November 2021 .
  8. Web site: Haskell 98 Language and Libraries - The Revised Report. Peyton Jones, Simon. December 2002. haskell.org.
  9. Web site: The GHC Team. 22 June 2006.
  10. Web site: Native Code Generator (NCG) . . Haskell.org . 17 September 2007 . 4 April 2019.
  11. Book: Peyton Jones , Simon . The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages . Prentice-Hall . 1987 . 0-13-453333-X . registration .
  12. Book: Implementing Functional Languages . Simon . Peyton Jones . David R. . Lester . Prentice-Hall . August 1992. 0-13-721952-0.
  13. Book: Cybernauts Awake!: Ethical and Spiritual Implications of Computers, Information Technology and the Internet. Church House Publishing. 1999. 978-0-7151-6586-7.
  14. Web site: Top computer scientist chosen to lead National Centre for Computing Education. UK Department for Education. 20 March 2019.
  15. Web site: Innovation by (and beyond) the numbers: A history of research collaborations in Excel. Microsoft. April 13, 2021.
  16. Web site: Advancing Excel as a programming language with Andy Gordon and Simon Peyton Jones. microsoft.com. Microsoft. May 5, 2021.
  17. Web site: Prof Simon L Peyton-Jones - Award Winner. Association for Computing Machinery. awards.acm.org.
  18. Web site: Simon Peyton Jones at the Academia Europaea. ae-info.org.
  19. Web site: SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award. Galois, Inc.. 7 June 2011. dead. https://web.archive.org/web/20110610125517/http://corp.galois.com/blog/2011/6/7/sigplan-programming-languages-software-award.html. 10 June 2011.
  20. Web site: Honorary Doctorate for Simon Peyton Jones. University of Glasgow. 20 July 2014.
  21. Web site: Professor Simon Peyton Jones, MA, FACM, FBCS, CEng. University of Kent. 14 February 2019.
  22. Web site: https://web.archive.org/web/20160429122444/https://royalsociety.org/people/simon-peyton-jones-12889. 29 April 2016. Professor Simon Peyton Jones FRS. Royal Society. London. Anon. 2016. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
  23. Web site: Roll of Distinguished Fellows of the BCS. British Computer Society. 2023.
  24. Web site: Computer Scientist and Educationalist, Prof Simon Peyton Jones to receive OBE. BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. 2022. BCS.
  25. Web site: Simon Peyton Jones FRS. Pembroke College Cambridge. Jan 2022.
  26. Web site: Distinguished Honorary Fellows. Cambridge Computer Laboratory. 2022.

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