Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index 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. This article is a stub. Please help to improve and extend it! This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.