L Peter Deutsch

Laurence Peter Deutsch (born on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and Portable Document Format interpreter.

Deutsch's other work includes the definitive Smalltalk implementation that, among other innovations, inspired Java just-in-time compilation 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" and finished it in 1963, when he was 17 years old.

He is also the author of several Request for Comments (RFCs), 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 (with a dot after the L).

After auditing undergraduate music courses at Stanford University, in January 2009, he entered the postgraduate music program at California State University, East Bay, and was awarded a Master of Arts (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.