Steele has served on accredited standards committees ECMA TC39 (ECMAScript, for which he was editor of the first edition), X3J11 (the C language), and X3J3 (Fortran) and is currently chairman of X3J13 (Common Lisp).
He was a technical contributor to X3J13, the ANSI subcommittee that standardized Common Lisp and contributed to the design of the programming language.