Kent M. Pitman is the President of HyperMeta, Inc. and has been involved for many years in the design, implementation and use of Lisp and Scheme systems. He is often better known by his initials KMP.
Kent Pitman is the author of the Common Lisp Condition System as well as of numerous papers on Lisp programming and computer programming in general.
He was a technical contributor to X3J13, the ANSI subcommittee that standardized Common Lisp and contributed to the design of the programming language. He prepared the document that became ANSI Common Lisp, the Common Lisp HyperSpec (a hypertext conversion of the standard), and the document that became ISO ISLISP. He can often be found on the Usenet newsgroup comp.lang.lisp, where he contributes not only expertise in Lisp and computer programming, but also an authoritative perspective on Lisp's evolution and Common Lisp's standardization. In some posts there, he has expressed his opinion on open-source software, including open source implementations of Lisp and Scheme, as something that should be judged individually on its essential merits, rather than automatically considered good merely by the fact of being free or open.