A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
Alan Perlis Quotes
You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing vitality of FORTRAN.
Similar Quotes
Cricket is the greatest game that the wit of man has yet devised.
- Sir Pelham WarnerAdvertising is selling Twinkies to adults.
- Donald R. VanceThe struggle of the male to learn to listen to and respect his own intuitive, inner prompt...
- Herb GoldbergEach generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the ...
- Francis SchaefferEach had defended his own country; the Germans Germany, the Frenchmen France; they had don...
- Ernst TollerComments on: "Alan Perlis Quotes: You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing..."
| Birth: | 1st April, 1922 |
| Death: | 7th April, 1990 |
| Nationality: | American |
| Profession: | Computer Scientist |
About
Perlis was born to a Jewish family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1943, he received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the Carnegie Institute of Technology. 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 MIT. His doctoral dissertation was titled "On Integral Equations, Their Solution by Iteration and Analytic Continuation".
In 1952, he participated in Project Whirlwind. He joined the faculty at Purdue University and then moved to the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1956. He was chair of mathematics and then the first head of the Computer Science Department. He was elected president of the Association for Computing Machinery in 1962.
He was awarded the 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 as a member of the team that developed the ALGOL programming language.
In 1971, Perlis moved to Yale University to become the chair of Computer Science and hold the Eugene Higgins chair. Perlis was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1977.
In 1982, he wrote an article, Epigrams on Programming, for ACM's 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.
He remained at Yale until his death in 1990.
Share with your friends