Daniel Weinreb

Daniel L. Weinreb (January 6, 1959 – September 7, 2012) was an American computer scientist and programmer, with significant work in the Lisp environment.

Early life

Weinreb was born on January 6, 1959 in Brooklyn, New York, and was raised there by his parents, Herbert and Phyllis Weinreb. He had two brothers, Bill and David, and attended Saint Ann's School.

Education

Weinreb graduated from St. Ann's School in Brooklyn, NY in 1975. He attended MIT 1975–1979 (starting at the age of 16), graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, where he wrote EINE, the text editor for the MIT Lisp Machine. EINE made use of the window system of the Lisp Machine, and thus is the first Emacs written for a graphical user interface. This was the second implementation of Emacs ever written, and the first implementation of Emacs in Lisp. Most of the notable subsequent Emacs implementations used Lisp, including James Gosling's Gosmacs, Bernard Greenberg's Multics Emacs, and Richard Stallman's GNU Emacs.

Professional life

During 1979–1980, Weinreb worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on the Amber operating system for the S-1, particularly the file system and the multiprocess scheduler.

In 1980, he co-founded Symbolics, developing software for the Symbolics Lisp Machine. He also participated significantly in the design of the Common Lisp programming language; he was one of the five co-authors of the original Common Lisp specification, Common Lisp: The Language, First Edition. He worked on Statice, an object-oriented database published by Symbolics in 1988.

In 1988, he co-founded Object Design, where he was one of the architects and implementors of ObjectStore, a leading commercial object-oriented database management system Object Database. It is still commercially maintained and available from Progress Software, which bought Object Design (then eXcelon, Inc.).

In 2002, he joined BEA Systems, where he was Operations, Administration, and Management Architect for WebLogic.

In 2006, he joined ITA Software, working on an airline reservation system. In 2009 Daniel Weinreb gave a Google Tech Talk about the use of Common Lisp as one of the implementation languages for the airline reservation system.

In 2009, he was the chair of the International Lisp Conference 2009 in Cambridge/MA.

Personal life

Weinreb married Cheryl Moreau in 1986 and they had a son, Adam, in 1991.

Dan Weinreb died on September 7, 2012, after a year-long battle with cancer.

Publications

• Alan Bawden, Richard Greenblatt, Jack Holloway, Thomas Knight, David A. Moon and Daniel Weinreb, "Lisp Machine Progress Report", MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, August, 1977
• Daniel L. Weinreb, A Real-Time Display-oriented Editor for the LISP Machine, Undergraduate Thesis, MIT EECS Department, January 1979
• Daniel L. Weinreb and Dave Moon, Lisp Machine Manual. MIT AI Lab, January 1979
• Daniel Weinreb and David Moon, "Flavors: Message Passing in the Lisp Machine", 1980
• Daniel Weinreb and David Moon. "Lisp Machine Manual", Third Edition. MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, March 1981, 471 pages.
• Weinreb, Daniel; Moon, David A., Introduction to Using the Window System, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Working Papers, WP-210
• Richard Stallman, Daniel Weinreb, and David Moon. "Lisp Machine Window System Manual." Edition 1.1, System Version 95, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 1983, 261 pages
• Steele,Guy L. Jr., Fahlman,S.E., Gabriel,R.P., Moon, D. A., Weinreb, D. L., Common Lisp: The Language, Digital Press, Burlington, Massachusetts, 1984.
• Symbolic language data processing system, Weinreb, Daniel L., Holloway, John T., Moon, David A., Cannon, Howard I., Knight, Thomas F. Edwards, Bruce E., European Patent Application EP0113460
• Richard D. Greenblatt, Thomas F. Knight and Daniel L. Weinreb, "The LISP Machine" in "Interactive Programming Environments" by David R. Barstow, Howard E. Shrobe and Erik Sandewall (editors)
• D Weinreb, N Feinberg, D Gerson, C Lamb, An object-oriented database system to support an integrated programming environment, Data Engineering Bulletin, 1988
• Charles Lamb, Gordon Landis, Jack Orenstein, Daniel Weinreb, "The ObjectStore Database System", Communications of the ACM, October 1991, Vol. 34, No. 10
• Daniel L. Weinreb and Sam J. Haradhvala, "Method and apparatus for virtual memory mapping and transaction management in an object-oriented database system", U.S. Patent #5649139
• Daniel Weinreb, Neil Feinberg, Dan Gerson, Charles Lamb, "An object-oriented database system to support an integrated programming environment." In: Gupta, R.; Horowitz, E. (Hrsg.): Object-Oriented Databases with Applications to CASE, Networks, and VLSI Design. Series in Data and Knowledge Base Systems. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, S. 117–129. Prentice Hall, 1991.