Simon Peyton Jones

Simon Peyton Jones (born in South Africa on January 18, 1958 ) is a British computer scientist who researches the implementation and applications of functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional languages. He is an honorary Professor of Computer Science at the University of Glasgow and supervises PhD Students at the University of Cambridge.

Peyton Jones graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1980, and worked in industry for two years before serving as a lecturer at University College London and (from 1990-1998) as a professor at the University of Glasgow, where he subsequently served as Head of the Department of Computer Science. Since 1998 he has worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. He is married to Dorothy, a priest in the Church of England, and they have three children.

He is a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language, and a principal designer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He is also co-creator of the C-- programming language, designed for intermediate program representation between the language-specific front-end of a compiler and a general-purpose back-end code generator and optimiser. C-- is used in GHC.

He was also a major contributor to the 1999 book Cybernauts Awake which explored the ethical and spiritual implications of the Internet.

In 2004 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.