Manfred von Thun

Manfred von Thun was the inventor of the Joy programming language.

According to the LaTrobe University Alumni news,

"Alumni and staff will be saddened to hear of the death of Manfred von Thun on 23 October after a long illness. Manfred was a member of the philosophy department from early 1972 until his retirement in 2003, but remained an honorary associate until 2009. Manfred specialized in logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, computer programming and cybernetics. He was also renowned for developing the computer programming language, Joy. He will be sadly missed."

There is a tribute page for those who wish to share their memories.

Dr von Thun's web pages remain on the LaTrobe University servers. They contain articles about joy, a textbook on Symbolic Processing in Pascal, as well as some collected notes on a self-hosting logical meta-language and a queue machine for processing expressions .

His final message to the concatenatve mailing list, a tribute to Slava Pestov, was posted October 3.

See also: A Conversation with Manfred von Thun (December 2003)