"Every man has two nations, and one of them is France." - Benjamin Franklin
Ian Piumarta is a computer scientist at Viewpoints Research Institute. He is fascinated by the idea of building systems that are maximally open, reflexive, dynamically self-implementing and understandable.
He spent many years working with Smalltalk. A copy of his Ph.D. thesis, Delayed Code Generation in a Smalltalk-80 compiler, is available online. He entertains himself in his spare time by maintaining the Unix version of Squeak! (a portable, full-featured, free Smalltalk that comes with full source code).
In 1993 he moved to Paris where he spent ten years working at IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), INRIA (Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique) and LIP6 (Laboratoire d'Informatique de l'Université Paris VI). In 2004 he moved to Palo Alto to work with Alan Kay, initially at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories and subsequently at VPRI.
Ian assembled and ran his first program at the age of 13 on a DEC PDP-10 before downsizing to 8-bit microcomputers on which he rapidly discovered a passion for programming language implementation. Amongst his most formative technical influences acquired at Manchester he cites the PDP-11 architecture, Lisp, Smalltalk-80 and TeX - each of which left a profound and lasting impression. He has taught university-level courses on operating system design, supervised and examined numerous Ph.D. candidates, served on six program committees, and published thirty articles in workshops, conferences and journals.
For your entertainment he has made an online version of his CV available. (It also contains a slightly more ``respectable'' [read: boring] photo of him. ;-)
Ian Piumarta Viewpoints Research Institute 1209 Grand Central Avenue Glendale, CA 91201 USAVia e-mail:
firstName@squeakland.org