








“Superb book!” —Prakash Swaminathan from review at CloudKnow




L Peter Deutsch

A prodigy, L Peter Deutsch started programming in the late ’50s, at age 11, when his father brought home a memo about the programming of design calculations for the Cambridge Electron Accelerator at Harvard. He was soon hanging out at MIT, implementing Lisp on a PDP-1, and hacking on and improving code written by MIT hackers nearly twice his age.

As a sophomore at UC Berkeley, he got involved with Project Genie, one of the first minicomputer-based timesharing systems, writing most of the operating system’s kernel. (Ken Thompson, inventor of Unix and the subject of Chapter 12, would also work on the project while a grad student at Berkeley, influencing his later work on Unix.) After participating in a failed attempt to commercialize the Project Genie system, Deutsch moved to Xerox PARC, where he worked on the Interlisp system and on the Smalltalk virtual machine, helping to invent the technique of just-in-time compilation.

He served as Chief Scientist at the PARC spin-off, ParcPlace, and was a Fellow at Sun Microsystems, where he put to paper the now famous “Seven Fallacies of Distributed Computing.” He is also the author of Ghostscript, the Postscript viewer. In 1992, he was part of the group that received the Association for Computing Machinery Software System Award, for their work on Interlisp, and in 1994 he was elected a Fellow of the ACM.

In 2002 Deutsch quit work on Ghostscript in order to study musical composition. Today he is more likely to be working on a new musical composition than on a new program, but still can’t resist the urge to hack every now and then, mostly on a musical score editor of his own devising.

Among the topics we covered in our conversation were the deep problems he sees with any computer language that includes the notion of a pointer or a reference, why software should be treated as a capital asset rather than an expense, and why he ultimately retired from professional programming.