On June 15 and 16 of 2012 we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing (June 23, 1912) in San Francisco (http://turing100.acm.org/final_program/tcc_final_program.pdf) with 33 living ACM A.M. Turing Award winners! It was especially great to see Nicklaus Wirth on the "Programming Languages: Past Achievements and Future Challenges" panel along with Susan Graham, Barbara Liskov and Frances Allen. You can watch the replays of the sessions at http://amturing.acm.org/acm_tcc_webcasts.cfm. Each year the ACM gives out the Turing Award to a person (or persons) "for major contributions of lasting importance to computing." I also visited the Alan Turing Codebreaker exhibit at the Science Museum in London back in September where I presented RAD Studio XE3 along with Bob Swart at our RAD Studio XE3 tour and the UK Developers Group meeting.
I am a huge fan of software engineering, programming, programming languages, compilers and tools. There are many of my computer science heroes who have won the Turing Award in these categories, http://amturing.acm.org/bysubject.cfm?cat=34, including:
- Perlis, Alan Jay (1966)
- Minsky, Marvin (1969)
- McCarthy, John (1971)
- Dijkstra, Edsger Wybe (1972)
- Knuth, Donald ("Don") Ervin (1974)
- Backus, John (1977)
- Iverson, Kenneth E. ("Ken") (1979)
- Hoare, C. Antony ("Tony") R. (1980)
- Ritchie, Dennis M. (1983)
- Thompson, Kenneth Lane (1983)
- Wirth, Niklaus E (1984)
- Cocke, John (1987)
- Milner, Arthur John Robin Gorell ("Robin") (1991)
- Brooks, Frederick ("Fred") (1999)
- Dahl, Ole-Johan (2001)
- Nygaard, Kristen (2001)
- Kay, Alan (2003)
- Naur, Peter (2005)
- Allen, Frances ("Fran") Elizabeth (2006)
- Liskov, Barbara (2008)
I hope some of the following will be considered for the 2012 ACM Turing Award (to be awarded in 2013), or in future years, based on their significant contributions to the world of computing:
- John von Neumann - everything !!!
- Grace Hopper - the A compiler, COBOL programming language
- Grady Booch, Ivar Jacobson, Jim Rumbaugh - UML’s three amigos
- Bjarne Stroustrup - the C++ programming language
- Seymour Papert - the Logo programming language
- John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz - BASIC programming language
- Peter Coad and Ed Yourdon - software engineering
- Alfred Aho, John Hopcroft, Jeffrey Ullman - compilers
- Richard Hamming - Hamming Code, Hamming Window
- Watts Humphrey - software engineering
- Barry Boehm - software engineering
- Bertrand Meyer - Eiffel programming language
- David Parnas - software engineering
- Per Brinch Hansen - Concurrent and Super Pascal
- Ralph Griswold - SNOBOL programming language
I can’t wait to see who will be selected by the ACM next year - http://amturing.acm.org/alphabetical.cfm
{ 4 } Comments
I certainly hope no one goes considering Bjarne Stroustrup for a Turing award. A Turing award winner is supposed to be someone who has improved the state of computer programming, while Stroustrup’s contribution has been of negative value. In fact, it’s hard to think of anyone else who’s done more damage to our craft! If he hadn’t been able to ride Ritchie’s coattails by marketing his utter disaster of a language as a successor to C, no one would have given it a second look, much less actually taken it seriously!
And then the computer industry would be a much better place, because all of the software that’s been written in C++–a language that seems to go out of its way to encourage and make it easy for developers to screw up in subtle, difficult-to-understand ways–would not have been written in C++, and we’d all have more stable, better behaved computer systems than we have today.
While I agree with your asessment of C++ (and most C derivitives) I also have to say that not all programming languages can be Object Pascal. There has to be at some others. And since OP has the best of the best there’s not much left for the rest.
Mason - quoting from the ACM Turing Award site: the Turing award is given "for major contributions of lasting importance to computing." This is definitely different from your statement about the winner having "improved the state of computer programming". It is not just about programming. Because of my personal interest computing areas: programming, compilers, languages and software engineering, most of the people on my list fit inside my categories with the exception of John von Neumann.
I will choose to respectfully disagree with you about your assessment of Bjarne’s contribution to computing. Stroustrup created C with Objects, a noble effort that helped move the C language forward into the world of object oriented programming. With the successful use of C++ in millions of applications, systems and devices, C++ has, in my opinion, definitely moved computing and computer programming forward in so many important ways.
Hamming got the 1968 Turing Award.
I agree with you on Brinch Hansen (but not on Naur) — but they don’t give the Turing Award to dead people.
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