He was a consultant. FYI: It's extremely rare for anyone from academia to make a commercially successful language. Their incentives are different. They want publishable novelty, and they don't care about building a useful suite of libraries and a vibrant community. Jones (Haskell), Syme (F#), and Odersky (Scala) are the only designers w/ academic backgrounds I can think of for marginally popular languages.

Lua was made by three academics at a university in Brazil. I consider it more than marginally popular (particular in computer games).

Also Ousterhout with Tcl/TK. Interestingly, he was an OS researcher not a language academic, and he made the language to solve problems he had, not to be academically interesting.

And note that among the major reasons that Haskell didn't get widely popular is that it is full of publishable novelty and lacked a useful suite of libraries* and vibrant community.

Until the past few years when Galois folks and bos did a lot of library work.

Academia might have been the wrong word. Do you know of any other language designer (except Larry Wall) who doesn't have a PhD?

Btw, what's the source of that consultant bit?

And before you say "Simon Peyton Jones!", you should know that he got a PhD four days ago – http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~muffy/SPJ_oration.pdf

Robin Milner of ML is the most prominent example I know. One of the two Turing award winners without a Ph. D (the other being Floyd.) He introduced polymorphic type inference to a full-blown programming language - this is the most jaw-dropping language feature I have seen to date:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Milner

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_inference

C#, Python, PHP, Javascript, Perl, and Ruby. Obj-C, because the guy had a doctorate in biology. They are all very smart people.

As the other comments said, Tcl and Lua are designed by phd guys. As were C++, Java and Erlang. I guess we've got a pretty good track record. I should use my phd in programming languages to do something useful. ;-) maybe later.