Who Wrote A⁺ ?

Arthur Whitney created "A", and therefore A+, which is extended from "A". Early language decisions were often hashed within the community, but Arthur was the final arbiter of taste.

The following people had a significant role in many areas of A+. We note what we believe are the most fundamental associations. Joel Kaplan motivated the entire enterprise. Stevan Apter implemented the graphical user interface. Jeff Birnbaum created an X11-based graphics tool kit, which later — enhanced with other functionality such as IPC — was packaged to stand alone as "MStk". Chuck Ocheret wrote much of the systems interfaces in the first years. David Weiss contributed significantly to the design. Dan Fisher implemented many of the algorithms to squeeze juice from the early platforms. In addition, Dan wrote the general purpose "dap" library, which served as the starting point for the MStk IPC code. George Lovas coded the phenomenal graph widget. Malcolm Austin dealt with robustness and debugging mechanisms for A+ programmers. John Mizel developed a manageable build process and worked out porting issues beyond the early SunOS and AIX versions. Josef Sachs integrated A+ with Emacs. Don Orth wrote the reference manual. Graham Driscoll created its HTML incarnation, and along with Don, taught A+ and developed written materials.

Beyond those most inspirational characters, much of the work over the years in bringing A+ to its present form was accomplished in the trenches by the MStk team. Of those not listed so far, the team included Kenny Chien, George Ju, Cecilia Panicali, Serge Shamis, Bill Steinberg, Vadim Strizhevsky and Eddie Wen.

Clearly, the early adopters of A/A+ drove development of the language and contributed materially. Seth Breidbart, Robert Gusick, Roger Hui, Keith Iverson, Mike Lebowitz, Jim Lucas, Mike McConigley, Erik Mueller, Larry Rohrs, and Mike Rosenberg are names that come to mind. This isn't intended to be all-inclusive; more people have contributed than we are able to name.

More recently, Brian O'Kelley contributed material code and concepts to tame the word size/endian dilemmas. Jon McGrew is the man behind our current aggressive training and documentation efforts.