Guy L. Steele, Jr.

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

Biography

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.

Works

While at MIT, Steele published more than two dozen papers with Gerald Jay Sussman on the subject of the Lisp language and its implementation (the Lambda Papers). One of their most notable contributions was the design of the programming language Scheme.

Leslie Jasper Steele

Leslie Jasper Steele (November 21, 1868 – July 24, 1929) was an American politician and lawyer.

Steele was born in Decatur, DeKalb County, Georgia to Michael A. and Martha Lucinda Smith Steele, Georgia, and graduated from Oxford College of Emory University in 1893. He taught school from 1893 to 1898, then attended and graduated from the University of Georgia (UGA) School of Law in Athens in 1899 with a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) degree and was admitted to the state bar that same year.

On November 6, 1904 he married Rubie Mae Sprayberry, the daughter of John G. and Lula V. Simpson Sprayberry, born 27 July 1885 Henry County, Georgia and died 23 May 1967 Decatur, DeKalb County, Georgia and was buried on the right-hand side of her husband. From this marriage there were eight children.

Steele began practicing in Decatur. He served on the DeKalb County Board of Education from 1902 to 1921 and was elected as the Mayor of Decatur in 1915 and served in that capacity until 1920. In 1915, Steele was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in the Georgia General Assembly and served in that seat until 1919. After his state congressional service, Steele serve as both city and county attorney from 1921 through 1925.