Guy L. Steele Jr.

Guy Lewis Steele Jr.
Guy Steele in 2015
Born	(1954-10-02) October 2, 1954 (age 62) Missouri, United States
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Thinking Machines
Alma mater	Harvard University, MIT
Doctoral advisor	Gerald Sussman
Known for	Programming languages
Notable awards	ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award (1988) Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (2007)

Guy Lewis Steele Jr. /ˈstiːl/ is an American computer scientist who has played an important role in designing and documenting several computer programming languages.

Steele was born in Missouri and graduated from the Boston Latin School in 1972. He received a BA in applied mathematics from Harvard (1975) and an MS and Ph.D. from MIT in Computer Science (1977, 1980). He then worked as an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a compiler implementer at Tartan Laboratories. Then he joined the supercomputer company Thinking Machines, where he helped define and promote a parallel version of Lisp called *Lisp (Star Lisp) and a parallel version of C called C*.

In 1994, Steele joined Sun Microsystems and was invited by Bill Joy to become a member of the Java team after the language had been designed, since he had a track record of writing good specifications for existing languages. He was named a Sun Fellow in 2003.