He was awarded the inaugural Turing Award in 1966, according to the citation, "for his influence in the area of advanced programming techniques and compiler construction." This is a reference to the work he had done on Internal Translator in 1956 (described by Donald Knuth as the first successful compiler), and as a member of the team that developed the programming language ALGOL.
In 1982, he wrote an article, "Epigrams on Programming", for the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) SIGPLAN journal, describing in one-sentence distillations many of the things he had learned about programming over his career. The epigrams have been widely quoted.[4]
He remained at Yale until his death in 1990.
Oral history interview with Allen Newell at Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Newell discusses the development of the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, including the work of Perlis and Raj Reddy, and the growth of the computer science and artificial intelligence research communities.