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William Cook (computer scientist)

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William R. Cook
Born(1963-11-21)November 21, 1963
DiedOctober 27, 2021(2021-10-27) (aged 57)
Known forDenotational semantics of Inheritance; Object-oriented programming; AppleScript
Academic background
EducationBrown University (PhD)
ThesisA denotational semantics of inheritance (1989)
Doctoral advisorPeter Wegner
Academic work
DisciplineComputer science
InstitutionsUniversity of Texas at Austin, Apple Inc., HP Labs

William Randall Cook[1] (November 21, 1963 – October 27, 2021) was an American computer scientist, who was an associate professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin.

Early life and education

Cook was born on November 21, 1963. He received his Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1989.

Career

Cook's research concentrated on object-oriented programming, programming languages, modeling languages, and the interface between programming languages and databases. Prior to joining UT in 2003, he was chief technology officer and co-founder of Allegis Corporation, where he was chief architect for several award-winning products, including the eBusiness Suite at Allegis, the writer's Solution for Prentice Hall, and the AppleScript language at Apple Computer.

At HP Labs his research was on the foundations of object-oriented languages, including formal models of mixins, inheritance, and typed models of object-oriented languages.

At Apple from 1989 to 1992, with a fantastic small team he designed and implemented AppleScript.

Cook won the Senior Dahl–Nygaard Prize in 2014.

Personal life

Cook died on October 27, 2021, at the age of 57.[2]

Selected papers

  • Inheritance is not subtyping, Proceedings of the 17th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages (1990)
  • AppleScript. Proceedings of the third ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages (HOPL III) Pages 1–21 ACM, 2007.

References