(Ray) Tim Teitelbaum (born April 12, 1943, United States) is an American computer scientist known for his early work on integrated development environments (IDEs), syntax-directed editing, and incremental computation.
As an educator and faculty member of the Cornell University Computer Science Department since 1973, he was recognized for his large-scale teaching of introductory programming, and for his mentoring of highly successful graduate students.
[6] Teitelbaum's more than 45 lectures and demonstrations of this early IDE during 1979–82, as well as the credo of his 1981 paper[6] co-authored with graduate student Thomas Reps, asserted: Programs are not text; they are hierarchical compositions of computational structures and should be edited, executed, and debugged in an environment that consistently acknowledges and reinforces this viewpoint.This was followed in 1984 by the Synthesizer Generator, also done in collaboration with Reps, which allowed a Program Synthesizer to be generated for different programming languages based on supplying attribute grammars.
[7] Motivated by the importance of immediate feedback in interactive systems such as IDEs, Teitelbaum's research in the 1980s and 1990s focused on the problem of incremental computation: Given a program P written in language L, and the result of executing P on input x, how can one efficiently determine the result of running P on input x′, where the difference between x and x′ is some small increment x′-x.In a body of work with his graduate students, Teitelbaum investigated this problem for a range of languages L that included attribute grammars, SQL, first-order functional languages, and the lambda calculus.
Teitelbaum's work at GrammaTech aimed at the design and implementation of tools that assist in making software safer and more secure.