Barbara Liskov has won the 2008 Turing Award!you have probably already seen in email or on ***SORELLE***'s BLOG Its already in Wikipedia's list of Turing Award winners. So why am I bothering to blog about it? Because I've already gotten 5 emails asking why I haven't blogged on it. Besides, there may be someone who didn't know it so this blog is doing that person a service. Below is an edited version of what ACM send me (and probably you) about this.
ACM has named Barbara Liskov the recipient of the 2008 ACM A.M. Turing Award for her contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, especially related to data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing.
Liskov revolutionized the programming field with groundbreaking research that underpins virtually every modern computer application for both consumers and businesses. Her achievements in programming language design have made software more reliable and easier to maintain. They are now the basis of every important programming language since 1975, including Ada, C++, Java, and C#.
Liskov heads the Programming Methodology Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, where she has conducted research and has been a professor since 1972.
The ACM A.M. Turing Award is ACM's most prestigious technical award. It recognizes contributions of lasting and major technical importance, and honors individuals whose work has advanced the field of computing. First presented in 1966, and named for British mathematician Alan M. Turing, the Turing Award is widely considered to be the Nobel Prize in Computing. It carries a $250,000 prize, with financial support provided by Intel Corporation and Google Inc.
For more on THIS YEARS Award winner see the ACM Press Release.
For more on THE TURING AWARD see the Wikipedia Entry which also includes a list of all of the winners.
Why do you say "***SORELLE***"?
ReplyDeleteOH -good question- I explained that when I first introduced her blog a while back, but that was a while back.
ReplyDeleteOne question I sometimes ask people is what would be their STAGE NAME if they were in showbiz. In her case she has the perfect one-name name
since ``Sorelle'' is both not-that-common and sounds nice. So I just use the one name. The capitalization
and the asterisks are a bit much,
but if she ever changes to showbiz she has a one-name name and a way to spell it.
She gets a kick out of it.
Why is your name Anonymous?
Your question is so incredibly
non-controversial that you need not hide behind Anonymous.
This is a different anonymous here, and wanted to explain why I (and I'm guessing other people as well) post as anonymous sometimes, even when the content is completely non-controversial. For one, who knows what will turn out to be controversial after all? But more importantly, I kind of want 'deniability' that I ever read the blog(s), let alone posted on it. E.g., if people know that you post on this blog, next time you post anonymously on a more controversial topic, people may suspect you.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that all this was really a conscious analysis, but it is what I came up with when I thought about it recently (I have only posted maybe 4-5 times total, and every time really non-controversial posts, but still it wouldn't even occur to me to do it with my name. In one case (Scott's blog), a real email address was required, and I gave my real one (which reveals to Scott my identity) - I wasn't too happy, but was fine with it. But I wouldn't post directly with my name. I am weird.
Oh, and congrats to Barbara Liskov!!