Allan M. Stavely

Allan M. Stavely died Thursday, August 22, 2024 in his Windsor, Colorado home-away-from-home, surrounded by loved ones. He was 74 years old. The cause was complications from cancer treatment.

Allan was a highly principled and forward-thinking computer scientist, a gifted teacher, a lively musician, a folk-dancer, a birder, a lifelong traveler, and a fine cook. Colleagues admired his focused enthusiasm as well as his integrity and sense of fairness. He was extraordinarily smart but also very kind. Allan loved to hike and see diverse wildlife on the refuges around Socorro.

On earning his PhD from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1976, Allan took a faculty position at New Mexico Tech to help build the most advanced undergraduate program in Computer Science (C.S.) at the time. His interests within C.S. included computational logic, the development of programming languages, and formal methods in software engineering. Allan became department chair in 1981, but soon retired and turned his attention to book-length projects and wide-ranging collaborations. He became emeritus faculty in 2001.

Allan’s book “Toward Zero-Defect Programming” championed methods for writing programs with almost no bugs. Industry norms in the 1990’s often involved hastily thrown together code, with a sense that the time for finding bugs could wait, and that individual coders were not responsible for foreseeing the defects their own code would ultimately bring about in the final software made by the team. Allan transformed this culture when he created the “cleanroom techniques” that make team members accountable to each other while building software.

A follow-up book, “Writing in Software Development”, aimed at making code literally readable. Here Allan popularized Donald Knuth’s “literate programming” for a wider audience, extending Knuth’s principles into writing effective visioning, specs, proposals, reviews and project histories.

Allan performed with Socorro musical groups for over 40 years. Having learned bassoon at Groves High School (Birmingham, MI), he joined the Tech Chamber Orchestra soon after moving to town. His bassoon anchored the community-theater pit orchestra for A Christmas Carol, Fiddler on the Roof, the Mikado, Into the Woods, and South Pacific.

On a penny-whistle and concertina, Allan led the Celtic Fringe band that kept the plaza coffee shop and Capitol Bar toe-tapping to traditional Irish jigs and reels. He organized Wassail concerts in December, complete with mulled cider and figgy pudding.

Allan had a deep love for the fuguing 4-part harmonies of West Gallery Carols from 1700s England. Performing these, he and his collaborators could bring unsuspecting listeners to tears. In England, Allan taught a shape note workshop featuring music from this era.

Allan had a gift for making mathematical material accessible, as in two books: “Surprises from Mathematics” (for readers 12 years and up) and “Programming and Mathematical Thinking: A Gentle Introduction to Discrete Math Featuring Python”. Students called him “Uncle Al” and considered him easy to relate to, even while he keenly raised curricular standards. In particular, Al’s challenging Compiler Writing course earned a reputation as a high-level capstone course that kept students quite involved with him individually. His students knew him as a good listener. As mathematical outreach, he teamed with faculty to honor mathematician and pioneering programmer Ada Lovelace on her eponymous holiday in October. In period costume, they performed skits of her interactions with a friend Charles Babbage, while serving tea.

Allan introduced many elementary children to the power of computer programs. Over a decade he ran an afterschool course in the visual coding language Scratch, and took pride in students’ good projects.

Allan Stavely was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 16, 1950, to Ann and Earl Stavely. He leaves behind two younger brothers, Ken and Don (Carmen), as well as many circles of friends for whom his loss leaves wide a gaping hole.

A memorial of Al’s life with music and refreshments will be held Friday, October 17, from 2-4 pm in Cramer 203. Contact Advancement@nmt.edu for zoom details and scholarship donations.