William Cook, RIP

Hamish Sanderson:

Dr William Cook, who along with Warren Harris designed and developed AppleScript for Apple back in the early 90s, has sadly passed away at age 57.

Shriram Krishnamurthi:

Much of 1990s OOP was defined by his seminal papers. When he returned after a decade in industry (AppleScript!) I invited him to @BrownCSDept (where he got his PhD from Peter Wegner) and we became friends. Tragic.

See also:

• Inheritance Is Not Subtyping (1990)
• AppleScript (2006)
• On Understanding Data Abstraction, Revisited (2009)

Previously:

• Larry Tesler, RIP

Update (2021-12-13): Christina Warren:

I’m nobody -- but I can’t express how much AppleScript meant to me as a kid when I was starting to figure out what programming was and how to do things. To this day, I still love to automate all the things. RIP Dr. Cook.

See also:

• The Open Scripting Architecture: Automating, Integrating, and Customizing Applications (1993)
• Hacker News