Guy L. Steele Jr. is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc. He received his B.A. in applied mathematics from Harvard College (1975), and his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science and artificial intelligence from M.I.T. (1977 and 1980). He has also been an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University; a member of technical staff at Tartan Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and a senior scientist at Thinking Machines Corporation. He joined Sun Microsystems in 1994.
He is author or co-author of five books: Common Lisp: The Language (Digital Press); C: A Reference Manual (Prentice-Hall); The Hacker's Dictionary (Harper & Row), which has been revised as The New Hacker's Dictionary, edited by Eric Raymond with introduction and illustrations by Guy Steele (MIT Press); The High Performance Fortran Handbook (MIT Press); and The Java Language Specification (Addison-Wesley).
He has published more than two dozen papers on the subject of the Lisp language and Lisp implementation, including a series with Gerald Jay Sussman that defined the Scheme dialect of Lisp. One of these, "Multiprocessing Compactifying Garbage Collection," won first place in the ACM 1975 George E. Forsythe Student Paper Competition. Other papers published in Communications of the ACM are "Design of a LISP-Based Microprocessor" with Gerald Jay Sussman (November 1980) and "Data Parallel Algorithms" with W. Daniel Hillis (December 1986). He has also published papers on other subjects, including compilers, parallel processing, and constraint languages. One song he composed has been published in CACM ("The Telnet Song", April 1984).
The Association for Computing Machinery awarded him the 1988 Grace Murray Hopper Award and named him an ACM Fellow in 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence in 1990. He led the team that received a 1990 Gordon Bell Prize honorable mention for achieving the fastest speed to that date for a production application: 14.182 Gigaflops. He was also awarded the 1996 ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award.
He has served on accredited standards committees X3J11 (C language) and X3J3 (Fortran) and is currently chairman of X3J13 (Common Lisp). He was also a member of the IEEE committee that produced the IEEE Standard for the Scheme Programming Language, IEEE Std 1178-1990. He represents Sun Microsystems in the High Performance Fortran Forum, which produced the High Performance Fortran specification in May, 1993.
He has served on Ph.D. thesis committees for eight students. He has served as program chair for the 1984 ACM Lisp Conference and for the 15th ACM POPL conference (1988) and 23rd ACM POPL conference (1996).