Alan Perlis

Also known as Alan Jay Perlis, Alan J. Perlis

American computer scientist (1922–1990)

Person · Open Library

Works: 4

Top works

The unofficial guide to buying a home
The unofficial guide to buying a home
Wallace Stevens
The Unofficial Guide to Buying a Home

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Music · MusicBrainz

Country: LV

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Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

MEGA6: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis Version 6.0
· 2013 · cited 34,688x
The ERA5 global reanalysis
· 2020 · cited 22,689x
Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2
· 2019 · cited 19,976x
Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome
· 2001 · cited 18,517x
DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs
· 2018 · cited 17,818x

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Quotes

“We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses.”
“Both knowledge and wisdom extend man's reach. Knowledge led to computers, wisdom to chopsticks.”
“There is an appreciated substance to the phrase "ALGOL-like" which is often used in arguments about programming, languages and computation. ALGOL appears to be a durable model, and even flourishes under surgery — be it explorative, plastic, or amputative.”
“The vision we have of conversational programming takes in much more than rapid turn around time and convenient debugging aids: our most interesting programs are never wrong and never final. [...] What is new is the requirement to make variable in our languages what we had previously taken as fixed. I do not refer to new data classes now, but to variables whose values are programs or parts of programs, syntax or parts of syntax, and regimes of control.”
“This language [LISP] induces humorous arguments among programmers, often being damned and praised for the same feature.”
“Programmers should never be satisfied with languages which permit them to program everything, but to program nothing of interest easily.”

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Key facts

Born: Alan Jay Perlis , ( 1922-04-01 ) April 1, 1922, Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died: February 7, 1990 (1990-02-07) (aged 67), New Haven, Connecticut , U.S.
Alma mater: Carnegie Institute of Technology (BS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS, PhD)
Known for: Internal Translator ALGOL Programming-language design Epigrams on Programming First Turing Award recipient
Awards: A. M. Turing Award (1966) IEEE Computer Pioneer Award (1986)
Fields: Computer science Programming languages Compilers
Institutions: Purdue University Carnegie Institute of Technology Yale University
Thesis: On Integral Equations, Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation (1950)
Doctoral advisor: Philip Franklin
Doctoral students: David Parnas Zohar Manna Gary Lindstrom John R. Levine

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Wikidata facts

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date of birth: 1922-04-01
date of death: 1990-02-07
Erdős number: 3
name in native language: Alan Jay Perlis

Sources (10)

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~11 min read

Article

Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and educator who helped establish computer science as an academic discipline. He was a pioneer in compiler construction and programming language design, and in 1966 became the first recipient of the A. M. Turing Award. The Association for Computing Machinery cited him "for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction".

Perlis worked on early digital-computing projects after the Second World War, including Project Whirlwind at MIT and computing work at the Ballistic Research Laboratory. At Purdue University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he helped develop the Internal Translator (IT), an early algebraic compiler for machines such as the Datatron 205 and IBM 650. He was also one of the American participants in the design of ALGOL 58 and later contributed to the growth of ALGOL-related language research.