The notion of Little Languages was introduced by Jon Bentley in his discussion of Kernighan's and Cherry's eqn -- a troff preprocessor for typesetting mathematics. Both papers are reprinted at the beginning of the Volume. They are followed by an essay by Paul Hudak on Domain Specific Languages. The remainder of the volume features languages and tools that every programmer needs to use:

-- troff and its pre-processors by Jaap Akkerhuis

-- AWK and sed by Arnold Robbins

-- SQL by David Klappholz

-- Tcl/Tk by Cameron Laird and Kathy Soraiz

-- Perl by Hal Pomeranz

-- Python by Mark Lutz

-- Little Languages for Music by Peter S. Langston.

Paul W. Abrahams

Paul W. Abrahams is a consulting computer scientist and past president of the Association for Computing Machinery. He specializes in programming languages, design and implementation of software systems, and technical writing. He is one of the designers of the first LISP system and also the designer of the CIMS PL/I system, which he developed while a professor at New York University. He also participated in the design of the Software Engineering Design Language (SEDL), developed at the IBM T.J. Watson Laboratories. In 1995 he was honored as a Fellow of the ACM. Paul resides in Deerfield, Massachusetts, where he writes, hacks, hikes, hunts wild mushrooms, and listens to classical music.

James H. Andrews

James H. Andrews is a Canadian who received his doctorate in 1991 from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His dissertation, “Logic Programming: Operational Semantics and Proof Theory,” won a 1991 British Computer Society Distinguished Dissertation Award and is published by Cambridge University Press.

Jamie is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. His research concerns software engineering and the semantics of programming languages.

Jim Blandy

Jim Blandy (jimb@red-bean.com) has extensive experience working with interpreted languages. He has maintained Guile for Project GNU since spring 1996. In the early 1990s, he worked on GNU Emacs for the Free Software Foundation; he and Richard Stallman were responsible for releasing Version 19 of Emacs. He lives in the Boston area with his cat, Foo.

Robert J. Chassell

Robert J. Chassell grew up in Stockbridge, Massacusetts, on property where, as he says, a recent archeological dig found human traces going back 6,000 years. He studied at St. John’s College (Santa Fe, NM) and Cambridge University. As a student volunteer, he worked on an archeological site in Dylan Thomas’s hometown in south Wales, digging remains from 50,000 years ago.

More recently, he has written Programming in Emacs Lisp: An Introduction, an elementary introduction for people who are not programmers.

He was the founding secretary/treasurer and chief financial officer of the Free Software Foundation, Inc., as well as a director. Before that he was part of a project working on expert systems at Lisp Machine, Inc. (Cambridge, MA), a computer manufacturer.

In addition to his abiding interest in social and economic history, Chassell is an avid amateur astronomer; he is an FAA certified flight instructor and a commercial and instrument-rated pilot, and flies his own airplane.

Brian Harvey

Brian Harvey is a lecturer in the Computer Science Division at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has been teaching Scheme-based courses since 1987. He is co-author of the text Simply Scheme: Introducing Computer Science. He is also involved in precollege education as lead developer of the freeware Berkeley Logo interpreter and author of the three-volume Computer Science Logo Style.

John McCarthy

John McCarthy is a professor of engineering and a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. One of the founders of artificial intelligence research, McCarthy invented LISP while an assistant professor at MIT. He was also involved in the development of ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60. John McCarthy was awarded ACM’s Turing Award in 1971. He received the First IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 1985. He also received the National Medal of Science in 1990, and is a fellow and past president of AAAI.

Jim Veitch

Jim Veitch is vice president of engineering for Franz Inc., a leading supplier of Lisp in the computer industry. Jim has been involved in developing Franz’s Allegro CL CLOS system for over 10 years. He has been involved in designing several user interfaces, designed and built a C/Lisp “Foreign function” interface, ported the Lisp system to various UNIX systems, and wrote an incremental loader for UNIX System V. He built a window system (Allegro Common Windows) for NeWS and for Sunview. Prior to joining Franz, Jim did research at AT&T Bell Laboratories and at Princeton University.

Jim has a Ph.D. in statistics from University of California, Berkeley, and received a B.Sc. in mathematics from Flinders University, Australia. Jim was a Fulbright scholar.

About the Series Editor Peter H. Salus

Peter H. Salus is the author of A Quarter Century of UNIX (1994) and Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and Beyond (1995). He is an internationally recognized expert and has been the keynote speaker at Uniforum Canada, the UKUUG, the NLUUG, and the OTA (Belgium) in the past few years. He has been executive director of the USENIX Association and of the Sun User Group and vice president of the Free Software Foundation. He was the managing editor of Computing Systems (MIT Press) from 1987 to 1996. He writes on a variety of computing topics in a number of magazines. His Ph.D. in linguistics (New York University, 1963) has led him from natural languages to computer languages.