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Barbara Liskov Wins Turing Award

Posted by kdawson on from the getting-a-clu dept.

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.'"

16 of 187 comments (clear)

  1. Turing test by ignishin · · Score: 5, Funny

    Does this mean she passed the turing test?

    1. Re:Turing test by MrEricSir · · Score: 5, Funny

      I hope not. MIT professors are not human.

      --
      There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
    2. Re:Turing test by rockNme2349 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Oblig XKCD

      http://xkcd.com/329/

      --
      Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
  2. Good for her... by Em+Emalb · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.
  3. Purses and wallets? by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?

    1. Re:Purses and wallets? by CaptainPatent · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, they're just bragging about the luxurious accessories the award lugs around all day.

      --
      Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
  4. Coincidentally by counterplex · · Score: 5, Informative
    I happen to have a printout of an article on "The Liskov Substitution Principle" and was wondering just yesterday how it is that as programmers we use these principles in everyday life yet don't know their names or the stories of how they came about. As the first US woman to earn a PhD in CS, I'm sure there are some interesting stories to tell about it.

    For those who might not have her original text handy, the Liskov Substitution Principle states (rather obviously):

    If for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all programs P defined in terms of T, the behavior of P is unchanged when o1 is substituted for o2 then S is a subtype of T

    which, when stated in the words of Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin as something we probably all intuitively understand from our daily work, is:

    Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it

    --
    $x = ($x * 10) % 10 >= 5 ? 1 + int $x : int $x
    1. Re:Coincidentally by shutdown+-p+now · · Score: 4, Insightful

      So either I went to the wrong university, and consistently the wrong employers

      Employers aren't there to teach you these things, and a lot don't care so long as you crank out code that mostly works (and, let's face it, it's not always easy to tell for them, and the concepts of "formal correctness" and "readability" and "maintainability" are often not even on their radar, unless a developer brings that up). And as for university - it may well be. If they had an OOD design course and never mentioned it, or at least described it in a formal way, then they wasted your time.

      Of course, it had somehow become an established norm that "object-oriented design" course in the uni is basically just applied Java programming; from what I've seen, the best you can expect from a typical graduate when it comes to OOD theory is to be able to recite "encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism" when asked what OO even is. It's especially ironic as only one of those three is actually a required ingredient, and even that is wrongly named. The very notion of MI gets people educated that way thoroughly confused when they first meet it, and you can forget about multimethods...

      or it's one of those self-evident principles that just didn't have a name before Barbara turned up.

      It was formulated by her in 1987. Unless your 8 years were mostly in Simula or Smalltalk, it did have a name by the time you've started working with OO. Definitely so if you've been doing Java or .NET.

      As for self-evidence... I sort of wish it was, and it really is very simple conceptually, but the fact that so many people still get it wrong over and over again shows that, apparently, it's not all that self-evident for your typical coder.

  5. 1968 by MoellerPlesset2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:1968 by MoellerPlesset2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why? Do you complain that we need more pregnant men also?

      Men aren't capable of becoming pregnant. I however, happen to believe women are just as capable of being good computer scientists as men are.
      The fact that only a small minority of computer scientists are women, means that upwards of half our best CS talent is going to waste.

      I think that's a pity.

    2. Re:1968 by turing_m · · Score: 4, Funny

      Why?

      Just a guess, but maybe his tastes don't lean towards guys with beards and questionable personal hygiene.

      --
      If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
  6. LSP it's not a guideline, it's a rule. by refactored · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Sadly, too many people still think it's a guideline, not a rule. Sorry, if your code violates the LSP, you've got a bug, it just hasn't bitten you yet.

    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.

  7. Re:making software more reliable? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Software is ALWAYS reliable. It is the code that people write that sucks.

    No, computers are reliable. They'll do exactly what you tell them to do. Software, however, sucks, since it is simply a representation of the code that people write, which also sucks.

  8. Re:making software more reliable? by ChienAndalu · · Score: 5, Funny

    No, electrons are reliable. They'll do what you tell them to do. Hardware engineers however design crappy hardware.

  9. Re:making software more reliable? by Ardeaem · · Score: 4, Funny

    No, electrons are reliable. They'll do what you tell them to do.

    I, for one, am never sure quite what my electrons are doing. After that Heisenberg guy, they've been a bit flaky...

  10. More women in the old days by Simian+Road · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Apparently there were far more women in computing in "the old days". The dominance of the male geeks is a relatively recent phenomenon.