Simon Peyton Jones


Simon Peyton Jones is a British computer scientist who researches the implementation and applications of functional programming languages, particularly lazy functional programming.

Education

Peyton Jones graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1980 and went on to complete the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science.

Career and research

Peyton Jones worked in industry for two years before serving as a lecturer at University College London and, from 1990 to 1998, as a professor at the University of Glasgow. Since 1998 he has worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England.
He is a major contributor to the design of the Haskell programming language, and a lead developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. He is also co-creator of the 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.
Peyton Jones chairs the Computing At School group, an organisation which aims to promote the teaching of computer science at school. Following these efforts, in 2019 he was appointed chair of the newly founded UK National Centre for Computing Education.

Awards and honours

In 2004 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for contributions to functional programming languages. In 2011 he received membership in the Academia Europaea.
In 2011, he and Simon Marlow were awarded the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for their work on GHC.
He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow in 2013 and an honorary doctorate from the University of Kent in 2017.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2016 and a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2017.