3300 Poinsett Hwy, Greenville, SC 29613, United States
The Bell Tower of Furman University, where Brad Cox received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1967.
Gallery of Brad Cox
5801 S Ellis Ave, Chicago, IL 60637, United States
The Department of Mathematics of the University of Chicago where Brad Cox obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1973.
Career
Gallery of Brad Cox
Gallery of Brad Cox
One Hampshire St, Cambridge, MA 02139, United States
The current building of Schlumberger-Doll Research Center where Brad Cox worked as a senior technical staff member from 1982 to 1983,
Gallery of Brad Cox
4400 University Dr, Fairfax, VA 22030, United States
An aerial view of the Fairfax Campus of the George Mason University where Brad Cox worked as an associate professor of social and organizational learning on the Economics Department from 1993 to 1999.
4400 University Dr, Fairfax, VA 22030, United States
An aerial view of the Fairfax Campus of the George Mason University where Brad Cox worked as an associate professor of social and organizational learning on the Economics Department from 1993 to 1999.
Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach
(The second edition of a book in collaboration with Andrew...)
The second edition of a book in collaboration with Andrew Novabilski that fully describes object-oriented programming in an accessible manner for a wide range of readers
Brad Cox is an American computer scientist and system architect who works in software engineering and object-oriented software development. He is known as the co-creator of the Objective-C programming language along with Tom Love.
Background
Ethnicity:
Brad Cox’s parents were pretended to be of Scottish or Irish origin.
Brad Cox was born on May 2, 1944, in Fort Benning, Georgia, United States. He is a son of Dewey M. Cox, a dairy farmer, and Nancy Cox, an elementary schoolteacher. Brad has a brother.
Soon after Brad’s birth, the family relocated to father's birthplace in South Carolina where the boy spent his childhood and youth. Helping his father to take care of the farm, Cox had experience in milking cows.
Education
Brad Cox studied at a small secondary school Fort Benning located in a three-room schoolhouse. Then, he came to the neighboring town and entered a high school. A pretty advanced student in the class, he paid special emphasis on Science and Math.
Later, while at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, he became more fascinated by Chemistry, especially organic. He enjoyed the possibility to stay there during summers and doing research. Cox made a decision to become a medical doctor but soon turned toward another path. While studying at the college, he came across his first computer. It was a hand-cranked calculator in the Chemistry Department. He graduated in 1967 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Organic Chemistry and Mathematics.
He entered the University of Chicago to pursue his training because it was there where the A-bomb had been invented. As to the department, Cox chose the one having the biggest computer budget according to rumors, a Department of Physics, Quantum Mechanics. Formally, he studied at the department but soon commenced to deal with Mathematical Biology. He received a Master’s degree in Physics and in 1973, obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree in Mathematical Biology.
The start of Brad Cox career can be counted from his first software project which he completed while working at Viral Oncology Center of the University of Chicago as a member of research staff from 1975 to 1977. It was a PDP-8 program for simulating clusters of neurons.
After this neural network project, he realized that he was more oriented to the computer side than the science side. This decision led the young man to join the staff of the Tal-Star Electronics in Princeton which was involved in a job related to incorporation of the huge gold-plated automation systems into the newsrooms building of Toronto Star newspaper. The similar project for the Chicago Tribune was realized from 1978 to 1980 while at Hendrix Electronics in Manchester. After completing the projects, Cox shifted to International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (ITT Inc.) where he had worked as a senior technical staff member in Advanced Technology Group for a couple of years.
While there, searching for ways to apply object-oriented programming for building telephone nets and elaborating programs meant to improve the productivity of the company, Cox met his future partner Tom Love. Unsatisfied with C language as a productivity foundation, Cox was looking for something to help him improve the situation. In 1982, he eventually came across the article on the Smalltalk in the Byte Magazine. Together with Love, he produced a precursor of Objective-C, the first Object-Oriented Pre-Compiler. It was a Smalltalk-like object system on top of the C language.
Gradually, the interests within the Group were divided. While other members were committed to IBM products, Love supported UNIX idea. He left the company in 1982 and joined the staff of Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratories in Ridgefield, Connecticut (currently Schlumberger-Doll Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts) followed few months after by Cox.
During the one-year tenure at the Center, Brad Cox dropped for a while his precompiler and concentrated on then actual company’s directions like Lisp Operating Object System.
It was Love who managed to sign a contract with Philips worldwide consisting of a review of their hardware engineering operation in order to improve their productivity. The contract gave birth to the own company of Cox and Love called Productivity Products International, or PPI at the beginning. There were two main goals of the firm. The first one was to make more productive programming language including component software and software components, and the second one was to help other companies to improve their software or hardware productivity. Gerald Weinberg, the author of ‘The Psychology of Computer Programming’, who had helped Cox to publish his debut book, ‘Object-Oriented Programming: An Evolutionary Approach’, took part in several of the firm’s projects.
The process of the transformation of the pre-compiler into the Objective-C programming language was not quick and easy. To earn more financial resources for their goal, Cox and Love collaborated with venture capital firms which provided the company with investment. It was then when the company's name changed to Stepstone on call of the venture capitalists.
The investment allowed Cox and Love to employ the specialists experienced in doing language design. One of those people was Steve Naroff. The language was elaborated and soon draw the attention of the NeXT computer and software company. In 1995 Apple purchased NeXT and began to use the language as the main to construct Mac OS X and iPhone applications.
Brad Cox stayed at Stepstone until the company closed in 1992. It was then when he switched to Java.
Thereafter, he worked for some time on his second book, ‘Superdistribution’. In 1993, he joined the George Mason University as an associate professor of social and organizational learning on the Economics Department.
During his six-year at the institution, Cox developed and maintained the ‘Middle of Nowhere’ web site as a vehicle for the distance education courses on web programming. Then, he tried his hand in government consulting.
Nowadays, Brad Cox is working in machine learning and security. His job consists of preventing possible hacking attacks that are underway. There are many government clients in the field.
(The book discusses the connection of software engineering...)
1996
Religion
Although his family was strongly religious, Baptist at first and then Presbyterian, Cox never accepted it.
Views
Quotations:
"Science is a stronger view, the objectivist view of the world."
"How do you have a science when every component you meet is the first time you encounter it? There’s no reusability, like steel. [...] They’re no bricks. There’s no – there’s not… So how do you have a science where everything is new every time you see it? Answer is you don’t. I mean, so I say there’s no such thing as computer science or software engineering."
"Initially, I came from [the hard sciences which held] a much harder-edged view of the world where reality is what reality is. And only way to view it is through the scientists’ lens. But I eventually came round to view social construction as being, you know, a better view of the world."
"Why did you take time off from work to come to this particular room when this new thing called the internet is claiming to be able to reach out and deliver education to you where ever you are?"
"More computer languages is like more human languages. Why would you want more human languages? If you've got the old British sets of weights and measures, is adding the metric system not just making things worse? Adding languages, adding systems, adding incompatible standards. I don't see it as a solution to anything, but as a way of making the problem harder."
Personality
Among Brad Cox’s hobbies while a teenager were walking in the woods and collecting snakes.
Later, at the University of Chicago, Cox was fascinated by playing guitar.
Connections
Brad Cox met his future wife, Etta Glenn, while studying at the University of Chicago. They married in September, 1975.