L Peter Deutsch

Who is L Peter Deutsch?

L Peter Deutsch or Peter Deutsch 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, 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. His published work and other public references before that time generally use the name L. Peter Deutsch.

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 six compositions performed on public concerts, and now generally identifies himself as a composer rather than a software developer.