Guy L. Steele Jr. (AB 1975, Harvard College; SM 1977 and PhD 1980, MIT) retired in 2025 after a five-decade career in the design, documentation, implementation, maintenance, and standardization of computer programming languages and large-scale parallel algorithms. He continues to serve the computer science community in volunteer capacities.
He taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, then worked for Tartan Laboratories, Thinking Machines Corporation, Sun Microsystems Laboratories, and Oracle Labs. He received the Grace Murray Hopper Award, the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award, and the Harry H. Goode Memorial Award. He is an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering.
In 1975, he and Gerald Jay Sussman created the Scheme language, still in wide use today, especially in education. He served on accredited standards committees X3J11 (C language) and X3J3 (Fortran), and served as chairman of X3J13 (Common Lisp). At Thinking Machines he co-developed the parallel languages Connection Machine Lisp, C*, and Connection Machine Fortran; his 1986 paper “Data Parallel Algorithms” with W. Daniel Hillis has over 1600 citations. He was a co-author of The Java Language Specification (1996) and the first project editor for JavaScript.
Professional position
- Former Software Architect, Oracle Labs
