Brad Cox
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Brad J. Cox (May 2, 1944 – January 2, 2021)<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> was an American computer scientist who was known mostly for creating the Objective-C programming language with his business partner Tom Love and for his work in software engineering (specifically software reuse) and software componentry.
BiographyEdit
Cox received his Bachelor of Science Degree in Organic Chemistry and Mathematics from Furman University,<ref>Template:Cite journal </ref> and his Ph.D. from the Department of Mathematical Biology at the University of Chicago.<ref>Template:Cite journal </ref> Among his first known software projects, he wrote a PDP-8 program for simulating clusters of neurons. <ref>Template:Cite journal</ref>
He worked at the National Institutes of Health and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute before moving into the software profession.<ref>Template:Cite book </ref>
Although Cox invented his own programming language, Objective-C, which he used in his early career, he stated in an interview for the Masterminds of Programming book that he wasn't interested in programming languages but rather in software components, and he regarded languages as mere tools for building and combining parts of software.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>
Cox was also an entrepreneur, having founded the Stepstone company together with Tom Love, established to release the first Objective-C implementation. Stepstone folded in 1994 and in April 1995, NeXT acquired the Objective-C trademark and rights from Stepstone.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> At the same time, Stepstone licensed back from NeXT the right to continue selling their Objective-C based products. As Apple Computer acquired NeXT a year later, they now hold the rights to Objective-C. Stepstone appears to have gone out of business in the early 2000s.<ref> {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }} </ref>
AwardsEdit
- Online course "Taming the Electronic Frontier" won a Paul Allen Distance Education Award ($25,000) in 1998.<ref>Template:Cite book
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NotesEdit
BooksEdit
External linksEdit
- Belaboring the ObviousTemplate:Dash His personal blog
- VirtualSchool.edu (archived 2017)Template:Dash A website for hosting his miscellaneous works
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