Richard E. Pattis

Richard Eric Pattis is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine, in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, where he taught introductory programming and data structures. He is the author of the Karel programming language, an educational language for beginners, and published the book Karel the Robot: A Gentle Introduction to the Art of Programming, which he used in his courses at Stanford University. Pattis has also been a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington, and he holds a master's degree from Stanford University. He later moved back to Pittsburgh, where he serves as a special faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University, advising computer science undergraduates. In 2011 he was elected an ACM Distinguished Member.