Tim Teitelbaum

(Ray) Tim Teitelbaum (born April 12, 1943, United States) is an American computer scientist known for his early work on integrated development environments (IDEs), syntax-directed editing, and incremental computation. As an educator and faculty member of the Cornell University Computer Science Department since 1973,he was recognized for his large-scale teaching of introductory programming, and for his mentoring of highly successful graduate students. As a businessman, he is known for having co-founded GrammaTech, Inc. and for having been its sole CEO since 1988.

Teitelbaum was educated at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University.

In 1978, Teitelbaum created the Cornell Program Synthesizer, one of the seminal systems that demonstrated the power of tightly integrating a collection of program development tools, all deeply knowledgeable about a programming language and its semantics, into one unified framework. His more than 45 lectures and demonstrations of this early IDE during 1979-82, as well as the credo of his 1981 paper co-authored with Thomas Reps, asserted:

Programs are not text; they are hierarchical compositions of computational structures and should be edited, executed, and debugged in an environment that consistently acknowledges and reinforces this viewpoint.

Motivated by the importance of immediate feedback in interactive systems such as IDEs, Teitelbaum’s research in the 1980s and 1990s focused on the problem of incremental computation:

Given a program P written in language L, and the result of executing P on input x, how can one efficiently determine the result of running P on input x’, where the difference between x and x’ is some small increment x’-x.

In a body of work with his graduate students, Teitelbaum investigated this problem for a range of languages L that included attribute grammars, SQL, first-order functional languages, and the lambda calculus. In addition to incremental evaluation methods, the work also included program transformation methods, i.e., the automatic derivation from P of an incremental program P’, where executing P’ on previous result P(x), increment x’-x, and auxiliary information retained from previous executions, efficiently performs the same computation as executing P on input x’.

Teitelbaum's recent work is aimed at the design and implementation of tools that assist in making software safer and more secure. Techniques include static program analysis and dynamic program analysis of both source code and machine code.

Awards and honors

Teitelbaum was co-recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery SIGSOFT Retrospective Impact Paper Award (2010) for his 1984 paper co-authored with Thomas Reps on the Synthesizer Generator.