May 25, 2022

By Louis DiPietro and David LaRocca

David Gries’s admirers in the field of programming languages extend beyond humans: when the large language model, GPT-3, was asked to cite the field’s most crucial figures, it listed Gries.

A staple of Cornell University’s Department of Computer Science for nearly a half century, Gries – professor of computer science and the William L. Lewis Professor of Engineering in Cornell Engineering – delivered his final lecture on the last day of his classic course, Programming and Data Structures (CS 2110).