Interview With Turing-Award Winner Robin Milner

Martin Berger writes "Turing Award (1991) winner Robin Milner is one of the most influential computer scientists. He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, but his research contributions are ubiquitous: he developed the first mathematically sound yet practical tool for machine assisted proof construction. This research has been continued successfully and led to many useful proof assistants such as HOL, Coq or Isabelle that are being used heavily for verification purposes today." Read on for more information about Milner, and a link to Berger's excellent interview with him. Berger continues "There is also a direct line from this strand of Milner's work to what may be one of the hottest topics in computer science: proof carrying code. Milner also headed the effort to develop ML (best known today by its descendant Ocaml), the first language to include polymorphic type inference together with type-safe exception-handling and module mechanisms. Most modern programming languages can trace some of their advanced features directly back to ML's pioneering efforts. Most of all, he established concurrency theory as a scientific field by creating and studying idealised concurrent programming languages like the Pi-Calculus. That calculus is becoming more and more influential in the design of new programming languages (for example Microsoft's XLANG) and the WWW infrastructure. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Milner. I wanted to find out about the man and the stories behind all this great research. I hope you find it as interesting as I do. The transcript of the interview can be found here."

Comments

turing

[Anonymous Coward]

was a paedophile faggot (its true, look it up)

Re:turing

[Anonymous Coward]

He wasn't a pedophile but he was gay. So what?

All gays are pedophiles. Duh.

Re:turing

[Anonymous Coward]

So what?

If Turing is known for two things (his gayness and his work in computing), then giving a Turing-Award is ambiguous (is it a gayness-award or a computing-award).

Re:turing

[Anonymous Coward]

What did Turing use for fisting back then? There was no KY Jelly, would he have just used Vaseline or shortening?

ive met robin milner-asked 9 Q! tsarkon reports

[Anonymous Coward]

this guy was really interesting to talk to i mean he knew more things than his core competency. it was an awesome experience.

9 steps to greasing your anus for Yoda Doll Insertion!
v 3.76.0
$YodaBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/yodanotes/9steppro cess.sgml,v 3.76.0 2003/11/24 20:30:25 tsarkon Exp $

1. Defecate. Preferably after eating senna, ex lax, prunes, cabbage, pickled eggs, and Vietnamese chili garlic sauce. Defecation could be performed in the Return of the Jedi wastebasket for added pleasure.
2. Wipe ass with witch hazel, soothes horrific burns. (Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda can use witch-hazel on mouth to soothe the horrific burns from performing so much analingus.)
3. Prime anus with anal ease. (Now Cherry Flavored for those butthole lick-o-phillic amongst you - very popular with 99% of the Slashdotting public!)
4. Slather richly a considerable amount of Vaseline and/or other anal lubricants into your rectum at least until the bend and also take your Yoda Doll , Yoda Shampoo bottle or Yoda soap-on-a-rope and liberally apply the lubricants to the Doll/Shampoo/Soap-on-a-rope.
5. Pucker your balloon knot several times actuating the sphincter muscle in order to work it in.
6. Put a nigger do-rag on Yoda's head so the ears don't stick out like daggers!
7. Make sure to have a mechanism by which to fish Yoda out of your rectum, the soap on the rope is especially useful because the retrieval mechanism is built in.
8. Slowly rest yourself onto your Yoda figurine. Be careful, he's big!
9. Gyrate gleefully in your computer chair while your fat sexless geek nerd loser fat shit self enjoys the prostate massage you'll be getting. Think about snoodling with the Sarlaac pit. Read Slashdot. Masturbate to anime. Email one of the editors hoping they will honor you with a reply. Join several more dating services - this time, you don't check the (desired - speaks English) and (desired - literate). You figure you might get a chance then. Order some fucking crap from Think Geek. Get Linux to boot on a Black and Decker Appliance. Wish you could afford a new computer. Argue that IDE is better than SCSI because you can't afford SCSI. Make claims about how Linux rules. Compile a kernel on your 486SX. Claim to hate Windows but use it for Everquest. Admire Ghyslain's courage in making that wonderful star wars movie. Officially convert to the Jedi religion. Talk about how cool Mega Tokyo is. Try and make sure you do your regular 50 story submissions to Slashdot, all of which get rejected because people who aren't fatter than CowboyNeal can't submit. Fondle shrimpy penis while making a Yoda voice and saying, use the force, padawan, feeel the foooorce, hurgm. Yes. Yes. When 900 years you reach, a dick half as big you will not have.

All in a days work with a Yoda figurine rammed up your ass.

I HAVE A GREASED UP YODA DOLL SHOVED UP MY ASS!

What you can do with you ass after sitti

Formal proofs?

[heironymouscoward]

One of the first things I learned as a computer scientist was the impossibility of proving a piece of software "correct".

Still, I always found it an interesting concept.

Then, one day, watched a Eureka (EU) team build a formal verification suite based on Z. One of my friends was on the team. One of the best programmers I ever knew, he decided the whole venture was a fraud, said so, and was fired.

My opinion? Formal proofs are a holy grail, unreachable, and the reality of software is that small, testable, interworking pieces is the only way to assure "correctness". That, and code generation, the wizard's wand of software.

Re:against the laws of GOD

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck your god and all other gods.