Lorinda Cherry

Who is Lorinda Cherry?

Lorinda Cherry is a computer programmer. She received her Masters in computer science from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1969. She joined Bell Labs in 1972 as an assembly language programmer, and worked there on the Unix operating system for several years.

Cherry has worked on mathematical tools, such as bc, and co-authored Eqn with Brian Kernighan. Her work on libplot inspired the later GNU plotutils package.

Her non-mathematical work included the dictionary for the Unix spell checker and the Bell Labs's Writer's Workbench. The Writer's Workbench was meant to help students learn to edit their work:

My feeling about a lot of those tools is their value in education is as much pointing out to people who are learning to write that they have choices and make choices when they do it. They don’t think of a writing task as making choices per se. Once they get it on paper they think it’s cast in stone. So it makes them edit.

Cherry also contributed to the Plan 9 operating system, cowrote "Typing Documents on the UNIX System: Using the –ms and –mcs Macros with Troff" with Mike Lesk for the Unix Tenth Edition Manual, and coded up the non-dictionary based spellchecker, typo, conceived by Bob Morris.