Simon Peyton Jones (born January 18, 1958) is a British computer expert who studies how to create and use functional programming languages, especially a type of programming that delays calculations until they are needed.
Education
Peyton Jones earned a degree in Electrical Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1979. At that time, he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. Later, he completed the Cambridge Diploma in Computer Science in 1980. He did not earn a PhD degree.
Career and research
Peyton Jones worked in industry for two years before becoming a lecturer at University College London. From 1990 to 1998, he was a professor at the University of Glasgow. From 1998 to 2021, he worked as a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England. Since 2021, he has worked at Epic Games as an engineering fellow.
He helped design the Haskell programming language and was a lead developer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He also co-created the C– programming language, which is used for intermediate program representation between the front-end of a compiler and the back-end code generator and optimiser. C– is used in GHC.
He contributed to the 1999 book Cybernauts Awake, which discussed the ethical and spiritual effects of the Internet.
Peyton Jones leads the Computing At School (CAS) group, an organisation that works to improve computer science education in schools. In 2019, he became chair of the newly created UK National Centre for Computing Education.
Since 2003, he has helped develop new features for Microsoft Excel after publishing a paper on user-defined functions. In 2021, anonymous functions and let expressions were added as a beta feature in the Office 365 version of Excel.
In 2004, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery for his work on functional programming languages. In 2011, he was awarded membership in the Academia Europaea (MAE).
In 2011, he and Simon Marlow received the SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award for their work on GHC.
He was given an honorary doctorate by the University of Glasgow in 2013 and honorary doctorates by the University of Kent and University of Bath in 2017.
He became a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2016 and a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society (DFBCS) in 2017.
He received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award in 2016 and the ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Educator Award in 2025.
In 2022, Peyton Jones was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for his work in education and computer science. He also became a Distinguished Affiliate Scholar at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and a Distinguished Honorary Fellow at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory.