Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer.
Education
McIlroy earned his Bachelor"s degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1954, and a Doctor of Philosophy in applied mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959 for his thesis On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells.
Career
As of 2007 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally developed Unix pipelines, software componentry and several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and transpose
His seminal work on software componentization makes him a pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product line engineering. He taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1954 to 1958.
From 1967 to 1968, McIlroy also served as a visiting lecturer at Oxford University.
In 1997, McIlroy retired from Bell Labs, and took a position as an Adjunct Professor in the Dartmouth College Computer Science Department. McIlroy is attributed the quote "The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code," where the meaning of negative code is taken to be similar to the famous Apple developer team anecdote (id est (that is), when a change in a program source makes the amount of lines of code decrease ("negative" code), while its overall quality, readability or speed improves).
Those types are not "abstract". They are as real as international and float.
As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business.
What you do today can be automated tomorrow. Keep it simple, make it general, and make it intelligible. The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.
Views
Quotations:
Those types are not "abstract". They are as real as international and float.
As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.
Keep it simple, make it general, and make it intelligible.
The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.
Membership
McIlroy joined Bell Laboratories in 1958, from 1965 to 1986 was head of its Computing Techniques Research Department (the birthplace of the Unix operating system), and thereafter was Distinguished Member of Technical Staff.