Alan Jay Perlis (April 1, 1922 – February 7, 1990) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and educator who helped establish computer science as an academic discipline. He was a pioneer in compiler construction and programming language design, and in 1966 became the first recipient of the A. M. Turing Award. The Association for Computing Machinery cited him "for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction".
Perlis worked on early digital-computing projects after the Second World War, including Project Whirlwind at MIT and computing work at the Ballistic Research Laboratory. At Purdue University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he helped develop the Internal Translator (IT), an early algebraic compiler for machines such as the Datatron 205 and IBM 650. He was also one of the American participants in the design of ALGOL 58 and later contributed to the growth of ALGOL-related language research.
Beyond his technical work, Perlis was a major institution builder. He was the first editor-in-chief of Communications of the ACM, served as president of the ACM from 1962 to 1964, and helped shape early computer-science curricula. The epigrams compressed Perlis's views on programming, language design, abstraction, and software culture into short, often humorous statements. They were widely circulated among programmers and computer scientists.
Perlis's legacy lies in both technical and institutional work. Technically, he helped move programming from machine-specific coding toward higher-level languages and compiler systems. Institutionally, he helped create the organizations, curricula, journals, and departments through which computer science became a recognized academic field.