L. Peter Deutsch
Encyclopedia
L Peter Deutsch or Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch, August 7, 1946 in Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...

, Massachusetts
Massachusetts
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript
Ghostscript
Ghostscript is a suite of software based on an interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and Portable Document Format page description languages.- Features :...

, a free software PostScript
PostScript
PostScript is a dynamically typed concatenative programming language created by John Warnock and Charles Geschke in 1982. It is best known for its use as a page description language in the electronic and desktop publishing areas. Adobe PostScript 3 is also the worldwide printing and imaging...

 and PDF interpreter.

Deutsch's other work includes the definitive Smalltalk
Smalltalk
Smalltalk is an object-oriented, dynamically typed, reflective programming language. Smalltalk was created as the language to underpin the "new world" of computing exemplified by "human–computer symbiosis." It was designed and created in part for educational use, more so for constructionist...

 implementation that, among other innovations, inspired Java just-in-time
Just-in-time compilation
In computing, just-in-time compilation , also known as dynamic translation, is a method to improve the runtime performance of computer programs. Historically, computer programs had two modes of runtime operation, either interpreted or static compilation...

 technology 15 or-so years later. He also wrote the PDP-1
PDP-1
The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1960. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at MIT, BBN and elsewhere...

 Lisp 1.5
Lisp programming language
Lisp is a family of computer programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized syntax. Originally specified in 1958, Lisp is the second-oldest high-level programming language in widespread use today; only Fortran is older...

 implementation, Basic PDP-1 LISP, "while still in short pants" when he was 12–15 years old. He is also the author of a number of RFCs
Request for Comments
In computer network engineering, a Request for Comments is a memorandum published by the Internet Engineering Task Force describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.Through the Internet Society, engineers and...

, the The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing
Fallacies of Distributed Computing
The Fallacies of Distributed Computing are a set of assumptions that Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems originally asserted programmers new to distributed applications invariably make...

, and originated the Deutsch limit
Deutsch Limit
The Deutsch limit is an adage about visual programming languages originated by Peter Deutsch that states:The term was made up by Fred Lakin, after Peter Deutsch made the following comment at a talk on visual programming by Scott Kim and Warren Robinett: "Well, this is all fine and well, but the...

 adage about visual programming language
Visual programming language
In computing, a visual programming language is any programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually. A VPL allows programming with visual expressions, spatial arrangements of text and graphic symbols, used...

s.

Deutsch received a Ph.D. in Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 from the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 in 1973, and has previously worked at Xerox PARC
Xerox PARC
PARC , formerly Xerox PARC, is a research and co-development company in Palo Alto, California, with a distinguished reputation for its contributions to information technology and hardware systems....

 and Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was a company that sold :computers, computer components, :computer software, and :information technology services. Sun was founded on February 24, 1982...

. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow
Fellow
A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...

 of the Association for Computing Machinery
Association for Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

.

Deutsch changed his legal first name from "Laurence" to "L" on September 12, 2007. His published work and other public references before that time generally use the name L. Peter Deutsch (with a dot after the L).

In January 2009, after auditing undergraduate Music courses at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, he entered the postgraduate Music program at California State University, East Bay
California State University, East Bay
California State University, East Bay is a public university located in the eastern region of the San Francisco Bay Area. The university, as part of the 23-campus California State University system, offers over 100 areas of study...

, and was awarded a M.A. in March 2011. As of mid 2011, he has had 6 compositions performed on public concerts, and now generally identifies himself as a composer rather than a software developer.

External links

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