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Barbara Liskov Wins Turing Award
jonniee writes "MIT Professor Barbara Liskov has been granted the ACM's Turing Award. Liskov, the first US woman to earn a PhD in computer science, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking. She is only the second woman to receive the honor, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the 'Nobel Prize in computing.'"
Does this mean she passed the turing test?
I bet she has some stories from "the old days" of being about the only female geek around.
Good for her.
Sent from your iPad.
She is only the second woman to receive the honor, which carries a $250,000 purse and is often described as the 'Nobel Prize in computing
Did they give $250,000 wallets to the men who won previously?
She was the chief architect for Internet Explorer.
...we can't tell her apart from a computer over a teletype link?
No, wait...
If only it were true.
I recall, in fact, the point in time when I first ran across Liskov's CLU in the context of working one of the first commercial distributed computing environments for the mass market, VIEWTRON, and determining the real problem with distributed programming was finding an appropriate relational formalism.
We're still struggling with the object-relational impedance mismatch today. The closest we are to finding a "solid basis" for computer science is a general field of philosophy called "structural realism" which attempts to find the proper roles of relations vs relata in creating our models of the world.
If anything, our descriptions should be "relations all the way down" unless we can find a good way, as some are attempting, to finally unify the two concepts as conjugates of one another.
Seastead this.
For those who might not have her original text handy, the Liskov Substitution Principle states (rather obviously):
which, when stated in the words of Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin as something we probably all intuitively understand from our daily work, is:
$x = ($x * 10) % 10 >= 5 ? 1 + int $x : int $x
Since it's not in the article, I looked it up. She got her PhD in 1968.
I initially thought that kind of sucked (Cambridge's 'Diploma in Computer Science' has been awarded since 1954), but apparently the first US PhD in CS named as such was in 1965 (University of Pennsylvania).
The field could still use more women though.
Who would want to make their software resistant to hacking? Let me guess: she worked on OpenOffice on behalf of Sun Microsystems.
Patronising git will miss irony of the above and correct me on the media meaning of 'hacking' in three... two... one...
Software is ALWAYS reliable. It is the code that people write that sucks.
I don't know how many people come from the "old school" of programming, but when I started, we didn't have all these libraries to link to. When we wanted a function to happen, we wrote it. And when we wrote it, we checked for overflows, underflows, error status and illegal input. We didn't rely on what few functions that already existed.
Most fatal program flaws are ridiculously easy to prevent, but bad programming habits prevail and short of creating some human language interpreter that writes code as it should be written, nothing will replace lazy programmers who trust library functions too much. And yes, I know about deadlines and not having time to waste and all that stuff. But there is something most people are also missing -- pride! I know that when I do something, I am putting my name on it whether it is directly or otherwise. And if my name gets associated with something, I make damned sure that it works and is of good quality. With the stuff that goes out these days (especially SQL injection?! PLEASE! What could be more fundamental than screening out acquired text data for illegal characters and lengths?!) it is clear that pride in one's own work is not something that commonly exists.
For those of you out there who agree with me, it probably doesn't apply to you. For those that disagree, tell me why? Why is a programming error FIXABLE but not PREVENTABLE?
I had to read one of her books for a grad school class. It was terrible. Chock full of errors, and tangents that were largely unrelated to software development.
She deserves recognition for the vast number of latent defects she has effectively removed from the worlds software with the LSP alone, I'm glad she got the award.
A very welcome change indeed... ;-)
...which carries a $250,000 purse.
A woman's purse!!
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
We just had dirt. Young whipper-snapper!
Liskov, the first US woman to earn a PhD in computer science, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking.
Clearly, she's never worked for Microsoft.
Zing!
of moody computing technology!
Apparently there were far more women in computing in "the old days". The dominance of the male geeks is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Aside from academic pissing contests you have a much more immediate worry: The lack of bankruptcy protection afforded student loans coupled with the trend in life-time income prospects for CS graduates.
Seastead this.
Liskov is a horrible author, and given my experience with her thoughts from "Program Development in Java," I would guess she is a horrible coder as well. Don't be conned into buying books based an award; her works are conflicting where they aren't simply wrong.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
That stuff she's talking about - "Toilet Paper", it's the same stuff you guys, for some weird reason, call "Bathroom Tissue".
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
everyone knows that there are no girls on the interweb
purse, so she should be Prada of herself. If it's another brand, she can curl up with it and grope it and say, "Gucci gucci gnu... Gucci gucci gnu...", but she can always ln with LV... I wonder if that purse will hold CUPS...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Frances E. Allen got the turing award in 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_E._Allen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award
LESKO!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko
Must've gone on an all-out CRAYZE to sub-do her...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Fashion jokes aren't gonna go to far on Slashdot, buddy. Just a word of advice.
Ride the skies
"But without it you'll end up with situations where a function will not accept a pointer to a triangle, because it will only take pointers to data type "polygon" from which triangle is derived."
Yes, I understand the implications.
"If the rule is correctly applied, the relationships between base and derived classes should also be a lot clearer. If it doesn't make sense for a derived type to be passed as a base type, you've probably made a wrong decision in your code design."
There are no "wrong decisions" unless some requirement is unfulfilled.
My point is that we sometimes we confuse dogma with correctness.
We judge all of them on their appearance. Deny it all you want but it's true. Women do it as well.
Their are only two kinds of women...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
it's becoming more like the Oscar Awards in Computing.
Not a man.
Men have a X and a Y chromosome (sometimes an extra X or Y). Women have no Y chromosome.
How about we agree that men have the right to bear children even though they can't, not having a womb, which is no ones fault, not even the Romans.
We can also agree that women have the right to study CS, even though most can't, being bad a math, which is no ones fault, not even the Republicans.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How about a billion dollars for violating LSP. http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/03/1459209 If you think about it, That's exactly what Tony Hoares mistake was. A violation of LSP. Sometimes the thing pointed to by "T *" does not behave as an instance of T. When it doesn't, as all too often it doesn't. Bad Shit happens. Sorry, type checking compiler can't help you thanks to Hoare's mistake.
of course she wasn't... she was the first woman "the first US woman to earn a PhD in computer science" RTFA, or at least the summary!
You're right. Nobody got mine, either. :/ The married men must've all left. ;)
My blog
They still teach Computer Science in countries where university is free or priced at much more affordable fees than in the USA.
CLU drew on the lessons learned with both Alphard and Vers. Alphard was from CMU and written by Wulf and Shaw, Wulf also writing the famous BLISS. Vers was made by Jay Early, whose parser was hugely important in all the compilers of the time. THe language itself (and its V-graphs) was heavily influenced by the Mem-theory of Anatol Holt (who was on the Alogl Committee and was a principle in designing the astonishing GP and GPX systems for the UNIVAC - first languages to explicitly feature ADTs per se. That became ACT, the adaptable programming system for the Army's Fieldata portable computers (portable in a completely different sense to the modern usage. He also hated Unicode, but that was a rival programming system back then. So reading the reports at the time can be misleading - "don't use Unicode on Portable Computers!"). Holt's ideas permeate computing, the notion of making any system of data representation as abstract as possible goes back to him.
CLU was written using MDL (pronounced muddle) which was a protoreplacement for LISP which featured ADTs. MDL was cowritten by Sussmann of LISP fame as a basis for PLANNER which became Scheme, and perhaps more geekly interesting is that is was also used for writing ZIL (and if you don't know about ZIL, you shouldn't be reading Slashdot)
CLU evolved into Argus, but the ideas were also used in the Theta programming system for the Thor OO database, and was also in PolyJ which was (as it suggests) a Polymorphic Java
Another fascinating development of the CLU ideas the SPIL system that Liskov co-wrote at the USAF-sponsored MITRE corp, which was in turn used for writing the VENUS operating system
Liskov has pioneered the notion of abstraction per se in language design for 40 years, and this generics-based approached is now taken for granted. She fully deserved the award for her insights as well as for her determination in fighting the reductionism represented by previous recipients (eg Dijkstra) although opposed by others (eg Iverson)
I have extracts for reports for all language of these on the HOPL website HOPL.murdoch.edu.au (too many URLs to paste in individually). Find CLU http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=637&name=CLU and follow the genealogy links. And if you haven't yet seen my 4000-strong programming-language family tree it is worth printing out for wallpaper if you have an A1 plotter.
Now if only those countries could get online forums!
is it just coincidence that two of the last three awards have been given to women, after decades of male dominance?
That any developer over 38 or thereabouts would have not heard about this while in University then (I know I didn't).
It is like demanding that all physicists become conversant with relativity theory in the 1920s...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your reply is a perfect example of why we need more of them.
Only they know all the reticence and outright discrimination suffered by women in the workplace, sometimes disguised as "curiosity" funnily enough.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It scares me shitless to think about a cat that can annoy me either dead or alive.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
In theory you could find all bugs in a program by simply following it step by step and then providing all the possible values for the relevant variables at each point and checking the outcomes at each point.
Good luck with that one. To give you an idea of the level of complexity you need to understand that we are dealing with numbers that scale in a similar fashion to any exponential function...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Abstraction Physics
No, just the married men who borrow their wives clothes.
One should look at C. J. Date's papers on the LSP (WHAT DOES SUBSTITUTABILITY REALLY MEAN?), before they try to implement it.
Code that implements e.g., squares that aren't rectangles or circles that aren't ellipses, is taking a shortcut or overcoming a technology flaw.