Richard P. Gabriel
| Richard P. Gabriel | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1949 Merrimac, Massachusetts |
| Nationality | United States |
| Education | Computer Science (Ph.D.) |
| Alma mater | Northeastern University, Stanford University |
| Occupation | Computer scientist |
| Employer | IBM |
| Known for | Common Lisp, Worse is Better, Maclisp, League for Programming Freedom, Lucid Inc., XEmacs |
| Children | Joseph, Mariko, Peter Gabriel |
| Awards | Association for Computing Machinery's 1998 Fellows Award, Allen Newell Award, 20$04 |
Richard P. Gabriel (born 1949) is an American computer scientist who is known for his work related to the Lisp programming language (and especially Common Lisp) in computing. His best known work was a 1990 essay “Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big”, which incorporated the phrase Worse is Better, and his set of Lisp benchmarks (the "Gabriel Benchmarks"), published in 1985 as Performance and evaluation of Lisp systems, which became a standard way of benchmarking Lisp implementations.
He was born in 1949, in the town of Merrimac in northeastern Massachusetts to two dairy farmers. He studied at Northeastern University, where he earned a B. A. in Mathematics (1967–1972). Currently he resides in Redwood City, California with his wife, Jo. He has a son named Joseph, and a daughter named Mariko, a Doctor of Physical Therapy in Los Altos, California.
Subsequently, he pursued graduate studies in mathematics at MIT, from 1972–73; he was tapped by Patrick Winston to become a permanent member of the AI Lab at MIT, but funding difficulties made it impossible to retain him. Gabriel tried to start up, with Dave Waltz, an AI Lab at the University of Illinois, but after two years the lab fell through due to general apathy. Gabriel did in this time period manage to earn an MS in Mathematics however (1973–1975).
Because of some of his mathematical work, Gabriel was then admitted to Stanford University; during that period (1975–1981), he served as a Teacher's Assistant to John McCarthy, the founder of Lisp; he ported Maclisp from its native ITS to WAITS; he earned a PhD. in Computer Science (on the topic of natural language generation); and he and his wife Kathy had a son. Around this time period, he became a spokesperson for the League for Programming Freedom.
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