AP
Alan Perlis
American computer scientist
1922 – 1990aged 67
A computer scientist who helped establish programming languages as a serious field of study rather than an engineering afterthought, doing foundational work on ALGOL and shaping how universities taught computing at Purdue, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale. In 1966 he became the first person to receive the ACM Turing Award, the field's highest honor, recognized before almost anyone else for work that helped set the terms of the discipline.