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Peter Naur Wins 2005 Turing Award

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sat Mar 04, 2006 03:47 PM
from the celebrating-people-who-deserve-it dept.
Programming IT Technology
An anonymous reader writes "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Peter Naur the winner of the 2005 A.M. Turing Award. The award is for Dr. Naur's fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of Algol 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming. The Turing Award is considered to be the Nobel Prize of computing, and a well-deserved recognition of Dr. Naur's pioneering contributions to the field."
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  • Took a while, didn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jcr (53032) <jcr@mac.STRAWcom minus berry> on Saturday March 04 2006, @03:49PM (#14850931) Journal
    The designer of Algol-60 is only getting this recognition in 2006? What?

    -jcr

  • There is a saying... (Score:4, Funny)

    by geoff lane (93738) on Saturday March 04 2006, @03:52PM (#14850935)
    ..."Algol 60 is a great improvement on all its successors"

    Nice to see Peter getting some recognition.
    • Algol 60 is a great improvement on all its successors

      I had a look [wikipedia.org] at it and was left wondering what we have been doing with programming languages for the last 50 years. Since then we seem to have invented automatic garbage collection, standardised API's and protocols and OO.

      Its a shame. Is the idea of a "language" the problem? Perhaps its time we moved on to something totally new. Don't ask me for examples, though.

      • Re:There is a saying... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by AuMatar (183847) on Saturday March 04 2006, @05:16PM (#14851172)
        It isn't the idea of a language thats the problem, the idea that language matters is the problem. Any problem can be solved in any Turing complete language. There's little to no difference between them. You're not going to write code an order of magnitude faaster because you change language. Short of having an API class you can leverage in one language and not the other, you'll be hard put to program faster by a factor of 10%, if you know the syntax of both languages equally well.

        The real problem is code reuse. 95% of what we do on a daily basis is to reinvent features available elsewhere. What we need are well designed, easy to use libraries that we can leverage and have most of the work done for us. Closed source programs are killing us, as we can't leverage off each other. Its like going back to the days of Newton and Liebnitz and requiring all mathematicians to prove the same ideas without reference to one another's work before moving on. Its ridiculous, and its the reason for our problems.

        • Re:There is a saying... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by belmolis (702863) <billposer@NOsPam.alum.mit.edu> on Saturday March 04 2006, @07:02PM (#14851608) Homepage

          It is much more difficult to master and retain the syntax of some languages than of others, so a lot of the time you aren't going to know them equally well. In any case, I think you're just wrong about language not making a difference. It is much slower to write in a low-level language than in a high-level language. Sure, you may have mastered the syntax, but you still have to spend time and mental energy keeping track of what goes where if you don't have data structures like structs and arrays, and just adding automatic storage allocation and garbage collection saves a lot of time and bugs.

          • Re:There is a saying... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by AuMatar (183847) on Saturday March 04 2006, @07:13PM (#14851642)
            I disagree- arrays and structs are made by quick macros, even in assembly. Think of it like an accessor function. It takes a small time up front to write- not a significant effort. I'm about 90% of the speed writing in asm than I am in C++.

            Garbage collection is a whole other rant- thats a complete strawman. Memory management takes a minor amount of time (almost 0), and making sure you properly null out dangling references in Java takes about as much. I find the problem to be totally different- there's a subset of programmers who just don't understand memory management. These people suck as programmers- everything you do in programming is resource management. Memory- alloc, use, free. Files- open, use, close. Networking- connect,use,close. Having people who don't understand that pattern on your team causes work to slow down by large amounts because of their incompetnece, not because of the language.

            • If you've got macros in assembler with macros that make structs and arrays easy, you're not writing real assembler but one of those new-fangled intermediate languages. That's a step up right there.

              Anyhow, its the storage allocation that is the big thing. I just don't agree that it makes such a small difference. It isn't just the need to free up what you use - that's relatively easy. It's the constant checking of whether you've got enough or need to reallocate, and the sometimes complicated and error-pro

              • Why do you have to worry about increasing your string length? That should be taken care of by your string library. Lets say you want to concatenate 2 strings. YOu don't just use strcat() do you? The correct way to do it is to write a function that goes something line this


                string* strcat(string *str1,string *str2){
                if(str2.length+str1.length>str1.size){
                if(reallocstr(dst,str2.length+str1.length)==ALLOCE RROR){
                return NU

              • Much like political ideals being limited only by barriers of diminished human integrity, so it is with your idea.

                Other than disagreement, I'm not sure WTF you're trying to say here. Try to stick to one rant at a time, and you'll make much more sense.

                We always come to put things in a perspective native to us, and we will always be most productive when we are most comfortable with the tools we use; this is the case in art, craftsmanship, and even programming. Heck, as an example, the hordes here on Slashdot

          • You've got to be kidding me. There are plenty of cases where you will write code a magnitude faster if a language is changed. Can you write a web application supporting complex business logic in C? Yeah you can. But it absolutely doesn't compare to Rails, Struts, or asp.NET

            I disagree. A quick download of a few libraries to help out (a database access library, a regex library, a better string library, maybe one or two others) and I'm ready to go. Rails is a particularly poor example- yeah, it autogenerate

  • I didn't think (Score:5, Funny)

    by Eightyford (893696) on Saturday March 04 2006, @03:52PM (#14850938) Homepage
    I didn't think humans could win this award.
  • Me, like many readers of slashdot, also hope to pass the Turing test one day, so I congratulate him on this achievement.

    Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia, the Turing test passes you.

    • Re:Me, like many readers of slashdot (Score:4, Funny)

      by MyLongNickName (822545) on Saturday March 04 2006, @03:58PM (#14850958) Journal
      Me, like many readers of slashdot, also hope to pass the Turing test one day, so I congratulate him on this achievement.

      You passed the test. No computer would mangle the pronoun usage like this! ;)

    • Re:Me, like many readers of slashdot (Score:5, Funny)

      by weg (196564) on Saturday March 04 2006, @04:42PM (#14851101)
      According to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy [bbc.co.uk] this will be hard, if you are a Computer Scientist:

      (copied from http://www.h2g2.com/ [h2g2.com] )

      Dave? Are you there Dave?

      A test for artificial intelligence suggested by the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. The gist of it is that a computer can be considered intelligent when it can hold a sustained conversation with a computer scientist without him being able to distinguish that he is talking with a computer rather than a human being.

      Some critics suggest this is unreasonably difficult since most human beings are incapable of holding a sustained conversation with a computer scientist.

      After a moments thought they usually add that most computer scientists aren't capable of distinguishing humans from computers anyway.
  • Look, Naur is mentioned right in the code!

    $ diff -Naur inftrees.c../zlib-1.2.2.orig/
    --- inftrees.c 2005-07-10 13:38:37.000000000 +0100
    +++../zlib-1.2.2.orig/inftrees.c 2004-09-15 15:30:06.000000000 +0100
    @@ -134,7 +134,7 @@
    left -= count[len];
    if (left < 0) return -1;/* over-subscribed */
    }
    - if (left > 0 && (type == CODES || max != 1))
    + if (left > 0 && (type == CODES || (codes - count[0] != 1)))
    return -1;/* incomplete set */

    Not much of a criterion for a Turing Award, though...

  • What about Backus-Naur form?

    • What about Backus-Naur form?

      RTFA. They mention BNF as well -- though they certainly don't give it as much time and space as it deserves. ALGOL was a tremendous accomplishment, but IMO, BNF far greater still. Then again, it's open to argument that John Backus really deserves most of the credit for BNF. At one time, BNF was an abbreviation for "Backus Normal Form" and only later was Peter Naur's name added in.

      Interestingly, Naur didn't seem quite as impressed with the success of Algol 60 as many peopl

    • Re:Just Algol-60? (Score:4, Informative)

      by weg (196564) on Saturday March 04 2006, @04:37PM (#14851086)
      BNF originally stood for "Backus Normal Form", and the name Backus Naur Form was introduced by Donald Knuth:

      @article{365140,
        author = {Donald E. Knuth},
        title = {Backus Normal Form vs. Backus Naur form},
        journal = {Commun. ACM},
        volume = {7},
        number = {12},
        year = {1964},
        issn = {0001-0782},
        pages = {735--736},
        doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/355588.365140 [acm.org]},
        publisher = {ACM Press},
        address = {New York, NY, USA},
        }
  • For those of you like me and have never worked with this language, some sample code is here [monash.edu.au]

    I think I would have been driven nuts trying to find the unmatched ' in my code.
    • I think I would have been driven nuts trying to find the unmatched ' in my code.

      And you call yourself a programmer? Build a macro or some kind of simple code to check FOR you!
    • For those of you like me and have never worked with this language, some sample code is here [monash.edu.au]

      Scotty: Captain, we din' can reference it!
      Kirk: Analysis, Mr. Spock?
      Spock: Captain, it doesn't appear in the symbol table.
      Kirk: Then it's of external origin?
      Spock: Affirmative.
      Kirk: Mr. Sulu, go to pass two.
      Sulu: Aye aye, sir, going to pass two.

      No more wordy than COBOL. Seems like a cool language

  • Datalogy (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Peter_Pork (627313) on Saturday March 04 2006, @04:28PM (#14851050)
    Peter Naur is an interesting character. For example, he dislikes the term "Computer Science", and prefers "Datalogy". He also gives Backus the whole credit for inventing BNF, which he calls the Backus Normal Form. I'm sure he has a better name for Algol-60...
    • Naur is hardly alone in not liking "computer science". The department where I studied CS was called "Information Science" because (as the chairman put it) computers are just instruments, not the thing being studied; do you call astronomers "telescopists"?

      But that's actually wrong. Computers are instruments, but they're not just instruments. Their existence drives the whole discipline. Leave "computer" out of the terminology and most people won't know what you're talking about. When I told people I was maj

      • The Algols were good (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Although you were making a joke, it didn't actually reflect reality at all. Algol 60 was quite seminal, and Algol 68 was almost the "Perl" of its time, really powerful.

        In almost 40 years since the Algol family of languages was defined, we haven't really moved things along all that much. Quite a lot of the "improvements" in modern languages are not fundamental but largely aesthetic. Pretty pathetic really.

        Nearly 4 decades ago, we programmed in Algol 68 and we walked on the moon. It's curious how the pace
  • There is a famous controversy, described here:

    http://spirit.sourceforge.net/dl_docs/bnf.html [sourceforge.net]

    Some accuse this guy of bogarting the credit.
    • From TFA: John Backus, another former Turing Award winner, acknowledged Naur as the driving intellectual force behind the definition of Algol 60. He commented that Naur's editing of the Algol report and his comprehensive preparation for the January 1960 meeting in which Algol was presented "was the stuff that really made Algol 60 the language that it is, and it wouldn't have even come about, had he not done that."

      And from your own refrence, Naur says I don't know where BNF came from in the first place.
  • It's interesting that Peter Naur is being recognized 40 years later, when another Algol team member, Alan Perlis, received the first Turing Award in 1966. Here's a photo of Perlis, Naur and the other Algol 1960 conference participants. [tugurium.com]

  • Some contributions of Algol60 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Marc Rochkind (775756) on Saturday March 04 2006, @04:39PM (#14851091) Homepage
    1. The Report on the language used a formal syntax specification, one of the first, if not the first, to do so. Semantics were specfied with prose, however.
    2. There was a distinction between the publication language and the implementation language (those probably aren't the right terms). Among other things, it got around differences such as whether to use decimal points or commas in numeric constants.
    3. Designed by a committee, rather than a private company or government agency.
    4. Archetype of the so-called "Algol-like languages," examples of which are (were?) Pascal, PL./I, Algol68, Ada, C, and Java. (The term Algol-like languages is hardly used any more, since we have few examples of contemporary non-Algol-like languages.)

    However, as someone who actually programmed in it (on a Univac 1108 in 1972 or 1973), I can say that Algol60 was extremely difficult to use for anything real, since it lacked string processing, data structures, adequate control flow constructs, and separate compilation. (Or so I recall... it's been a while since I've read the Report.)
    • > 1. The Report on the language used a formal syntax specification, one of the first, if not the first, to do so. Semantics were specfied with prose, however. Unfortunately this is the case with all programming languages (with the exception of standard ML).
  • I have been using his work for years. Congrats to him
    and his fantastic career.

    Hedley

  • Danes everywhere... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by weg (196564) on Saturday March 04 2006, @04:53PM (#14851125)
    Amazing how many programming languages were actually invented by Danish computer scientists. Peter Naur (ALGOL), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), Anders Hejlsberg (C#), and Mads Tofte contributed a good deal to SML.
          • Trying to get two economists to agree on a macro issue is almost impossible. If it was a real science, at least the basics would be known, tested, and proven by now.

            I'll grant that there are many conflicting models in macro. Many of them stem from the assumptions. For example, assuming a closed economy or an open economy. In the real world and throughout history, various countries are somewhere in between, but often closer to one or the other. Thus, choosing appropriate assumptions for the question you'

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