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Alan Perlis
Sign in to saveAlso known as Alan Jay Perlis, Alan J. Perlis
American computer scientist (1922–1990)
OverviewAI-generated
Alan Perlis (1922–1990) was an author whose works include *The unofficial guide to buying a home* and *Wallace Stevens*. He is recognized in the American Academy Arts Sciences collection and the Turing Award collection. His Erdős number is 3.
Perlis is associated with several quotes regarding programming and wisdom. One quote states, "We toast the Lisp programmer who pens his thoughts within nests of parentheses." Another notes, "Both knowledge and wisdom extend man's reach. Knowledge led to computers, wisdom to chopsticks." A third quote observes that the LISP language "induces humorous arguments among programmers, often being damned and praised for the same feature."
Synthesized by Vinony from 12 facts across 7 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Wikiquote, MusicBrainz, Open Library, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
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
via Open Library + Wikidata
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- MEGA6: Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis Version 6.0
· 2013 · cited 34,827x
- The ERA5 global reanalysis
· 2020 · cited 24,157x
- Reproducible, interactive, scalable and extensible microbiome data science using QIIME 2
· 2019 · cited 20,860x
- Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome
· 2001 · cited 18,614x
- DeepLab: Semantic Image Segmentation with Deep Convolutional Nets, Atrous Convolution, and Fully Connected CRFs
· 2018 · cited 18,247x
via Crossref · CC0
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.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
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
via Wikipedia infobox
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
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.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Alan Perlis” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.