| L Peter Deutsch | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 7, 1946 Boston, Massachusetts |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
L Peter Deutsch or Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch, August 7, 1946 in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter.
Deutsch's other work includes the definitive Smalltalk implementation that, among other innovations, inspired Java just-in-time technology 15 or-so years later. He also wrote the PDP-1 Lisp 1.5 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, the The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing, and originated the Deutsch limit adage about visual programming languages.
Deutsch received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973,[1] and has previously worked at Xerox PARC and Sun Microsystems. In 1994 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Deutsch changed his legal first name from "Laurence" to "L" on September 12, 2007.[2] 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, he entered the postgraduate Music program at California State University, East Bay, 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.