Alan Perlis

Alan J. Perlis (April 1, 1922 - February 7, 1990 ) was a prominent computer scientist. He was the first recipient of the Turing Award.

According to the citation, the award was: 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

He was the first head of the Computer Science Department of Carnegie-Mellon University.

In 1982, he wrote an article for ACM's SIGPLAN journal, Epigrams In Programming, describing in one-sentence distillations many of the things he had learned about programming over his career. The epigrams have been widely quoted.

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