Daniel Weinreb

Daniel L. Weinreb was a software engineer at Google who made foundational contributions to the Lisp programming language and its machine environment during the formative years of MIT’s AI Laboratory. Weinreb enrolled at MIT at age 16, earning his B.S. in computer science and electrical engineering in 1979. As an undergraduate, he and Mike McMahon wrote EINE — the first implementation of Emacs in Lisp and the first Emacs built for a graphical user interface — and its successor ZWEI, both of which became standard editors on the MIT Lisp Machine. He went on to receive his doctorate from MIT in computer science. In 1980, he co-founded Symbolics, where he helped develop both the Lisp Machine and the Common Lisp language specification; he was one of the five co-authors of Common Lisp the Language, the original language standard. He later co-founded Object Design (ODI), where he helped build ObjectStore, a leading commercial object-oriented database. He subsequently held engineering and architecture roles at BEA Systems and ITA Software, and in 2009 chaired the International Lisp Conference.