Douglas McIlroy
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy | |
|---|---|
McIlroy at the Japan Prize Foundation in 2011 | |
| Born | April 24, 1932 Newburgh, New York |
| Alma mater | Cornell University (B.S., 1954) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1959) |
| Known for | Macros, Unix pipelines, Unix philosophy, software componentry, echo, diff, sort, join, RUNOFF, tr, Unix manual |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science, mathematics, engineering |
| Thesis | On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells (1959) |
| Doctoral advisors | Eric Reissner |
| Website | www |
Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is an American mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools, such as echo, spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. He was also one of the pioneering researchers of macro processors and programming language extensibility. He participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.
His seminal work on software componentization and code reuse makes him a pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product line engineering.