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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?
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.
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?
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.
Apparently there were far more women in computing in "the old days". The dominance of the male geeks is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Frances E. Allen got the turing award in 2006 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_E._Allen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award
We don't call it that. We call it toilet paper like normal people. Makers of toilet paper call it bathroom tissue, I guess because they want a name that's a little more distant from "ass wipe" or less evocative of a porcelain bowl filled with crap or something, though they'll talk about their "bathroom tissue" in advertisements while showing cartoon bears (chosen because as everyone knows, bears shit in the woods) with little scraps of toilet paper all over their fat bear asses, which I can't help but wonder who the fuck has this problem and why, but I'm afraid of the answer, and apparently the right brand of ass wipe will solve it so lets just try to forget about that okay?
What were we talking about? Oh right. It's called "pop". "Soda" is okay too I guess.
The enemies of Democracy are
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.
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.