Terence John Parr was born in Los Angeles, California, USA in the year of the dragon on August 17, 1964 during the week of the Tonkin Gulf Crisis, which eventually led us into the Vietnam Conflict; coincidence? Terence's main hobbies in California were drooling, covering his body in mud, and screaming at the top of his lungs.
In 1970, Terence moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado with his family in search of better mud and less smog. His formal education began in a Catholic grade school where he became intimately familiar with penguins and other birds of prey. Terence eventually escaped private school to attend public junior high only to return to the private sector--attending Fountain Valley School for the "education" only a prep school can provide. After being turned down by every college he applied to, Terence begged his way into Purdue University's School of Humanities. Much to the surprise of his high school's faculty and the general populace, Terence graduated in 1987 from Purdue with a bachelor's degree in computer science.
After contemplating an existence where he had to get up and go to work, Terence quickly applied to graduate school at Purdue University's School of Electrical Engineering. By sheer tenacity, he was accepted and then promptly ran off to Paris, France after only one semester of graduate work. Terence returned to Purdue in the Fall of 1988, eventually finishing up his master's degree in May 1990 despite his best efforts. Hank Dietz served as major professor and supervised Terence's master's thesis.
A short stint with the folks in blue suits during the summer of 1990, convinced Terence to begin his Ph.D.; again, Hank Dietz was his advisor. He passed the Ph.D. qualifier exam in January of 1991, stunning the local academic community. After three years of course work, research, and general fooling around, Terence finished writing his doctoral dissertation and defended it against a small horde of professors and students on July 1, 1993.
After completing a year of penance with Paul Woodward and Matt O’Keefe at the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at the University of MN as a postdoctoral slave, Terence formed Parr Research Corporation and leapt into the unknown on August 1, 1994.
The Java programming language started its inexorable climb to stardom in early 1995. Terence entered the mad rush of Java startups in late 1995, forming MageLang Institute (www.MageLang.com) with Tom Burns and Mel Berman, in order to provide exceptional language training and further the cause of Java. Terence still maintains PCCTS while working 26 hours a day at MageLang and is allegedly having a pretty good time.
Terence Parr is the director and co-founder of MageLang Institute. He received a B.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in computer engineering from Purdue University, Lafayette, IN. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Army High Performance Computing Research Center at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Parr founded Parr Research Corporation, a software development and consulting company specializing in language translation problems.
Dr. Parr is the primary author of the public domain PCCTS language tool kit, which is used extensively throughout the research and industrial community to develop compilers, translators and interpreters: JavaSoft, Army Research Labs, Jet Propulsion Lab, Lawrence Livermore, Sun Labs, Apple, Arthur Andersen, Intel, and Motorola, NeXT, and SYBASE to mention a few organizations using Dr. Parr's tool kit. He has published a book on PCCTS and a variety of technical papers on the application of language theory. Dr. Parr occasionally teaches a course called “Computer Language Translation: Java to C++” at the University of California Santa Cruz. By day, Terence is a wild-eyed highly-caffeinated Java evangelist. By night, Terence works on the 2.00 version of PCCTS, which is a complete rewrite in Java to generate Java as well as other languages.