Alan Perlis

Alan J. Perlis

Born| (1922-04-01)April 1, 1922

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.

Died| February 7, 1990(1990-02-07) (aged 67)

New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.

Education|

* Carnegie Mellon University (BS)
* Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS, PhD)

Known for|

* IT
* ALGOL
* APL

Awards|

* Turing Award, 1966
* Computer Pioneer Award, 1985

Scientific career
Fields| Computer science
Institutions|

* Association for Computing Machinery
* Carnegie Mellon University
* Purdue University
* Yale University

Thesis| On Integral Equations, Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation (1950)
Doctoral advisor| Philip Franklin
Doctoral students|

* Gary Lindstrom
* Zohar Manna
* David Parnas
* John R. Levine

Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990) was an American computer scientist and professor at Purdue University, Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University. He is best known for his pioneering work in programming languages and was the first recipient of the Turing Award.[1]

## Contents

* 1 Biography
* 1.1 Epigrams on Programming
* 2 Publications
* 2.1 About Alan Perlis
* 3 See also
* 4 References
* 5 External links

## Biography

Perlis was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1939.[2] In 1943, he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later renamed Carnegie Mellon University).

During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army, where he became interested in mathematics. He then earned both a master's degree (1949) and a Ph.D. (1950) in mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His doctoral dissertation was titled "On Integral Equations, Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation".

In 1952, he participated in Project Whirlwind.[3] He joined the faculty at Purdue University and in 1956, moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He was chair of mathematics and then the first head of the computer science department. In 1962, he was elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery.

He was awarded the inaugural Turing Award in 1966, according to the citation, "for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction." This is a reference to the work he had done on Internal Translator in 1956 (described by Donald Knuth as the first successful compiler), and as a member of the team that developed the programming language ALGOL.

In 1971, Perlis moved to Yale University to take the chair of computer science and hold the Eugene Higgins chair. In 1977, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

### Epigrams on Programming

In 1982, he wrote an article, "Epigrams on Programming", for the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) SIGPLAN journal, describing in one-sentence distillations many of the things he had learned about programming over his career. The epigrams have been widely quoted.[4] He remained at Yale until his death in 1990.

The epigrams are a series of short, programming-language-neutral, humorous statements about computers and programming, which are widely quoted. It first appeared in SIGPLAN Notices 17(9), September 1982. In epigram #54, Perlis coined the term "Turing tarpit", which he defined as a programming language where "everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."

## Publications

Publications, a selection:[5]

* 1957\. Internal Translator (IT): A Compiler for the 650. With J. W. Smith and H. R. Van Zoeren.
* A. J. Perlis and C. Thornton (Apr 1960). "Symbol manipulation by threaded lists". Communications of the ACM 3 (4): 195-204. doi:10.1145/367177.367202.
* 1965\. An introductory course in computer programming. With Robert T. Braden.
* 1970\. A view of programming languages. With Bernard A. Galler
* 1975\. Introduction to computer science
* 1977\. In Praise of APL: A Language for Lyrical Programming
* 1978\. Almost Perfect Artifacts Improve only in Small Ways: APL is more French than English
* 1981\. Software Metrics: An Analysis and Evaluation. With Frederick Sayward and Mary Shaw
* 1986\. FAC: A Functional APL Language. With Tu Hai-Chen.

### About Alan Perlis

* Denning, Peter J. (May 1990). "Alan J. Perlis—1922–1990: a founding father of computer science as a separate discipline". Communications of the ACM 33 (5): 604–605. doi:10.1145/78607.214943.
* Cheatham, Thomas (1978). "ALGOL session". History of Programming Languages. New York, NY: ACM Press. p. 171. doi:10.1145/800025.1198357. ISBN 978-0127450407. https://archive.org/details/historyofprogram0000hist/page/171. Retrieved 2007-09-18.

## See also

* List of pioneers in computer science

## References

1. ↑ Ulf Hashagen, Reinhard Keil-Slawik, Arthur L. Norberg (2002) History of Computing: Software Issues. p.26
2. ↑ "A.M Turing Award Winners: Alan J. Perlis". https://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/perlis_0132439.cfm.
3. ↑ National Academy of Engineering (1979) "Alan Jay Perlis" in: Memorial tributes. Vol 10. p.168
4. ↑ Computer science quotations
5. ↑ For a listing of his talks and lectures (1951–1988) see Alan J. Perlis Papers, 1942–1989. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.

## External links

* Oral history interview with Allen Newell at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Newell discusses the development of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, including the work of Perlis and Raj Reddy, and the growth of the computer science and artificial intelligence research communities.
* Alan J. Perlis Papers, 1942–1989. Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis
* List of quotes (Yale University)
* Full article text -- (including so-called "meta epigrams", numbers 122-130)

* v
* t
* e

APL programming language

Features|

* APL syntax and symbols
* Direct function (dfn)
* EBCDIC code page
* Iverson bracket
* Rank
* Shared Variables

Implementations|

| Major|

* Dyalog APL
* IBM APL2
* APL2000
* SHARP APL
* APLX
* NARS2000

|

Dialects|

* A+
* APLNext
* ELI
* GNU APL
* J
* K, Q; kdb+
* LYaPAS
* Polymorphic Programming Language (PPL)

Community|

| Professional
associations|

* Association for Computing Machinery: SIGAPL
* British APL Association

|

Organizations|

* Analogic Corporation
* Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
* CompuServe
* The Computer Company (TCC)
* Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
* DNA Systems
* Dyalog Ltd.
* IBM
* I. P. Sharp Associates
* Kx Systems
* Manugistics Group
* Micro Computer Machines (MCM)
* Science Research Associates
* Scientific Time Sharing Corporation (STSC)
* Soliton Incorporated
* Telecompute Integrated Systems, Inc.
* Time Sharing Resources (TSR)
* University of Maryland

People|

* Phil Abrams
* Bob Bernecky
* Larry Breed
* Charles Brenner
* Fred Brooks
* Jim Brown
* Adin Falkoff
* Patrick E. Hagerty
* Herbert Hellerman
* Roger Hui
* Kenneth E. Iverson
* Dick Lathwell
* Eugene McDonnell
* Robert Metzger
* Roger Moore
* Alan Perlis
* John Scholes
* J. Henri Schueler
* Bob Smith
* Edward H. Sussenguth Jr.
* Arthur Whitney
* William Yerazunis
* Rodnay Zaks

Other|

* Iverson Award

* Category
* Commons

* v
* t
* e

A. M. Turing Award laureates

1960s|

* Alan Perlis (1966)
* Maurice Vincent Wilkes (1967)
* Richard Hamming (1968)
* Marvin Minsky (1969)

1970s|

* James H. Wilkinson (1970)
* John McCarthy (1971)
* Edsger W. Dijkstra (1972)
* Charles Bachman (1973)
* Donald Knuth (1974)
* Allen Newell / Herbert A. Simon (1975)
* Michael O. Rabin / Dana Scott (1976)
* John Backus (1977)
* Robert W. Floyd (1978)
* Kenneth E. Iverson (1979)

1980s|

* Tony Hoare (1980)
* Edgar F. Codd (1981)
* Stephen Cook (1982)
* Ken Thompson / Dennis Ritchie (1983)
* Niklaus Wirth (1984)
* Richard Karp (1985)
* John Hopcroft / Robert Tarjan (1986)
* John Cocke (1987)
* Ivan Sutherland (1988)
* William Kahan (1989)

1990s|

* Fernando J. Corbató (1990)
* Robin Milner (1991)
* Butler Lampson (1992)
* Juris Hartmanis / Richard E. Stearns (1993)
* Edward Feigenbaum / Raj Reddy (1994)
* Manuel Blum (1995)
* Amir Pnueli (1996)
* Douglas Engelbart (1997)
* Jim Gray (1998)
* Fred Brooks (1999)

2000s|

* Andrew Yao (2000)
* Ole-Johan Dahl / Kristen Nygaard (2001)
* Ron Rivest / Adi Shamir / Leonard Adleman (2002)
* Alan Kay (2003)
* Vint Cerf / Bob Kahn (2004)
* Peter Naur (2005)
* Frances E. Allen (2006)
* Edmund M. Clarke / E. Allen Emerson / Joseph Sifakis (2007)
* Barbara Liskov (2008)
* Charles P. Thacker (2009)

2010s|

* Leslie G. Valiant (2010)
* Judea Pearl (2011)
* Shafi Goldwasser / Silvio Micali (2012)
* Leslie Lamport (2013)
* Michael Stonebraker (2014)
* Martin Hellman / Whitfield Diffie (2015)
* Tim Berners-Lee (2016)
* John L. Hennessy / David Patterson (2017)
* Yoshua Bengio / Geoffrey Hinton / Yann LeCun (2018)

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