L Peter German

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Laurence Peter Deutsch (born August 7, 1946 in Boston ) is a US- American computer scientist and among other things the original developer of Ghostscript and founder of the associated company Aladdin Enterprises . He is also the author of several RFCs . On September 12, 2007, German shortened his first name Laurence to L (no period). Many of his earlier publications had already appeared with the abbreviated first name under L. Peter Deutsch .

biography

German is the son of the physicist Martin German , studied from 1964 at the University of California, Berkeley and reached in June 1973, his work on interactive program verifier the Ph.D. in Computer Science .

In 1963 he implemented Lisp for the PDP-1. That was the second implementation of Lisp and the first Lisp implementation with an interactive Read-Eval-Print-Loop, with input / output via a typewriter.

From 1971 to 1986 he worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) . From 1981 he belonged to the Smalltalk development group. In the following years he became increasingly frustrated as the project result was not published. In 1983 and 1984, he looked outside of Xerox PARC for another job and in early 1986 decided to leave the company. Before that (1984) he published the book Efficient Implementation of the Smalltalk-80 System . In 1986 he started Ghostscript , a free PostScript implementation, to develop for the GNU Project and founded Aladdin Enterprises to commercialize Ghostscript . At the same time he worked for ParcPlace , a spin-off from Xerox PARC, under whose name Smalltalk was launched. In 1991 he moved to Sun Microsystems .

In 1992 he received the ACM Software System Award for his work on Interlisp.

In 1994 he left Sun Microsystems, wrote The Seven Fallacies of Distributed Computing (in German about the seven fallacies in distributed computing , expanded by James Gosling to eight fallacies) and became a Fellow of the ACM .

As a pensioner, Deutsch devotes himself to composition . Motivated by this, he was involved in the MusicXML community until 2014 .

Important software projects

Works

  • LOOM in small talk. , XEROX inter-office memorandum, September 1980.
  • ByteLisp and its Alto Implementation. , Conference Record of the 1980 LISP Conference, August 1980.
  • with Adele Goldberg: Smalltalk yesterday, today and tomorrow. In: byte. August 1991.

literature

  • Peter Seibel: Coders at Work: Important programmers and their success stories . mitp, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8266-9103-4 , chapter 11: L. Peter Deutsch , p. 375-405 (English: Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming . 2009. Translated by Reinhard Engel).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ L. Peter Deutsch, Edmund C Berkeley: The LISP Implementation for the PDP-1 Computer. ( Memento of July 4, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) March 1964.
  2. L Peter Deutsch: Finale 2014. a final word. In: MusicXML Mailing List. MakeMusic, Inc./Michael Good, March 14, 2014, archived from the original on April 7, 2014 ; accessed on March 16, 2014 (English, after disagreements with Michael Good, Deutsch announces his return from the community.): "... Actually, I think it's time for me to just let go of my concerns about MusicXML's specification and Finale's file formats. (...) And as a wise composer friend of mine said to me when I was in Music graduate school (paraphrased), "Anyone can do software, but only you can write your music." (...) I think I'll enjoy life more as a barely-known composer with friends, at least, who love the music I write. "