William Cook (computer scientist)

This article is about the programming language researcher. For the operations researcher and mathematician, see William J. Cook.

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 Science at the University of Texas at Austin.

William R. Cook
Born	(1963-11-21)November 21, 1963
Died	October 27, 2021(2021-10-27) (aged 57) Austin, Texas, U.S.
Known for	Denotational semantics of Inheritance; Object-oriented programming; AppleScript
Academic background
Education	Brown University (PhD)
Thesis	A denotational semantics of inheritance (1989)
Doctoral advisor	Peter Wegner
Academic work
Discipline	Computer science
Institutions	University of Texas at Austin, Apple Inc., HP Labs

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.

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.