Barbara Liskov Wins Turing Award 187
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.'"
Re:making software more reliable? (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.
Re:seriously? (Score:3, Insightful)
tangents that were largely unrelated to software development.
Tangents are related to geometry, not software development. Besides, professors write textbooks so they can make their students buy them, and the professors get some of the students' money; not because they're any good at it. I thought everyone knew that.
Re:making software more reliable? (Score:2, Insightful)
but when I started, we didn't have all these libraries to link to. When we wanted a function to happen, we wrote it.
Functions? Back when I started, we didn't have functions. We had jump instructions.
You kids and your newfangled 'functions' and 'libraries'. Now get off my lawn!
Re:1968 (Score:2, Insightful)
> The field could still use more women though.
Why?
Do you complain that we need more pregnant men also?
Re:1968 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:making software more reliable? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's great. Now that you guys built up the roads, bridges, and traffic lights... The rest of us are interested in actually using them to GET SOMEWHERE.
Rewriting OpenGL, a scene graph, network interface code, XML Readers, etc, etc, etc. for each project would only lead to increasing the amount of buggy code in existence and no actual work getting done. We really should be past reinventing the square wheel...
Seriously, you've gone beyond the stereotypical "In my day..." old coot bullshit and straight into loony "uphill both ways in a snowstorm" territory. Using library functions instead of writing your own isn't any different than using power tools over hand tools, the quality of the result has to do with the person using them, not how easy the tools are to use. And while something built by hand may *seem* nicer, the difference in the end doesn't really matter--and you're able to get a hell of a lot more done with modern tools.
Re:1968 (Score:3, Insightful)
"The field could still use more women though."
Why?
Not that there shouldn't, but you are blindly stating something without any argument.
WHat does a women bring that a man doesn? or vise versa?
When we can determine that, then maybe we can find out why the field continues to attracts so few women. Even in the presence of programs that push very hard to get door open and to give women priority in the education there just aren't a lot of women.
I am genuinely interested in why?
Yhe more I think about it, the more I wonder if it is the type of work.
Hey mods:
There is a difference between genuinely wondering why a disparity exists(as I am) then sexism or bigotry.
Re:Coincidentally (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
To be honest, I would consider anyone who does not know what LSP is, to be OO-ignorant, even if (s)he does code in an OO language. It is a very fundamental rule, much more important that all the fancy design patterns. I guess it's possible to "invent" it on your own, just as it's possible to normalize databases without remembering, or even knowing about the strict NF definitions, but in either case, chances are high you'll get it wrong eventually.
Re:Purses and wallets? Nahh... she got a $250k (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:1968 (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't know why in recent times there is such a disparity of men and women in C.S., but I imagine your attitude might have something to do with it...
I really don't know how to respond to this... you're either trying to be funny (but got modded +3 insightful), or are seriously trying to imply that a woman who's good at C.S. is as much of a freak as a pregnant man.
All of a sudden I feel very alone in this field.
Re:Coincidentally (Score:3, Insightful)
On a side note... I remember a lot of people complaining about how Java 5 generics were oh-so-unobvious and hard when it came to lower and upper bounds etc. Meanwhile, the topic "why can't I cast List to List - this must be broken!" is recurring on microsoft.public.dotnet.languages.csharp probably about every two weeks. Both cases are absolutely trivial when one understands and carefully applies LSP to the problem.
Which, I guess, just shows that many Java and .NET programmers don't really understand the theory behind their tools, even when it's directly applicable to the code they write every day. Sad...
Proof, hmm, would you like a price tag on that? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:making software more reliable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Now some bugs are inexcusable. Divide by 0 crashes spring to mind as the most glaringly obvious inexcusable bug.
Why is everyone talking about all these obvious elementary bugs? Division by zero, integer overflow, illegal input... I haven't even heard anyone mention anything as sophisticated as a NULL pointer dereference, much less a memory deallocation problem or God forbid a race condition.
It's just that everyone around this thread is trying to have this profound discussion of fundamental software errors, yet talks like they're in a high school programming class.
Re:1968 (Score:2, Insightful)
WHat does a women bring that a man doesn? or vise versa?
A different perspective. And maybe a less-confrontational attitude.
Re:Coincidentally (Score:5, 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 [acm.org] 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.