Don Syme
Australian computer scientist
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Don Syme is an Australian computer scientist and a Principal Researcher at GitHub. He is the designer and architect of the F# programming language, described by a reporter as being regarded as "the most original new face in computer languages since Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++ in the early 1980s."[1]. He is a visiting Professor at King's College London.
Earlier, Syme created generics in the .NET Common Language Runtime, including the initial design of generics for the C# programming language, along with others including Andrew Kennedy[1][2] and later Anders Hejlsberg. Kennedy, Syme and Dachuan Yu also formalized this widely used system.[3]
Since 2022, he has worked at GitHub Next on artificial intelligence for software engineering, including Continuous AI[4], GitHub Agentic Workflows[5] and Copilot Workspace.[6]. Previously he has worked on formal specification, interactive proof, automated verification and proof description languages.[7]
He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge,[1] and is a member of the IFIP working group on functional programming. He is a co-author of the book Expert F# 4.0.[8]
In 2015, he was honored with a Silver Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering.[9]