Douglas McIlroy

Malcolm Douglas McIlroy
McIlroy at the Japan Prize Foundation in 2011
Born (1932-04-24) April 24, 1932 (age 92)
Newburgh, New York
Alma materCornell University (B.S., 1954)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D., 1959)
Known forMacros, Unix pipelines, Unix philosophy, software componentry, echo, diff, sort, join, RUNOFF, tr, Unix manual
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science, mathematics, engineering
Thesis On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells  (1959)
Doctoral advisorsEric Reissner
Websitewww.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/

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.[1] 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[2] and code reuse[3][4] makes him a pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product line engineering.

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference stug was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Bown, Rodney L., ed. (2–5 June 1986). "First International Conference on Ada (R) Programming Language Applications for the NASA Space Station, volume 2 - NASA-TM-101202" (PDF).
  3. ^ McIlroy, Malcolm Douglas (January 1969). "Mass produced software components" (PDF). Software Engineering: Report of a conference sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Garmisch, Germany, 7–11 Oct. 1968. Scientific Affairs Division, NATO. p. 79.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference End03 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).