John Henry Thompson, born in 1959, is the inventor of the Lingo programming language used in the Adobe Flash Player and a former Chief Scientist at Macromedia (now Adobe). Born in Kingston, he spent part of his childhood in Jamaica before moving to the UK and later to New York, where he developed a strong interest in computer programming at high school. Self-taught in several languages, he went on to earn a Computer Science degree from MIT, also studying visual arts due to his passion for creativity.
Thompson is best known for developing Lingo, a scripting language that powers interactive multimedia applications in Macromedia Director and other tools. His innovations helped merge computer programming with visual art allowing artists and designers with little programming knowledge to create inter-active content for websites, video games and animations thus changing the appearance of these media totally. He also contributed to software like MediaMaker and VideoWorks. The Adobe Flash Player plug-in which allowed users to play videos, games and other inter-active content was in use up to 2020 when it was finally withdrawn as websites developed integrated programmes for this purpose.
In 2012, Thompson was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal by the Institute of Jamaica. He continues to work in the USA – lecturing and developing apps and has conducted mobile app development workshops in Jamaica.
Mr. John Henry Thompson
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Computer Science
Computer Scientist
Jamaica
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