Peter Naur Wins 2005 Turing Award

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."

Took a while, didn't it?

The designer of Algol-60 is only getting this recognition in 2006? What?

-jcr

Re:Took a while, didn't it?

This may help to explain his importance even to this day:

The Backus-Naur form (BNF) (also known as the Backus-Naur formalism, Backus normal form or Panini-Backus Form) is a metasyntax used to express context-free grammars: that is, a formal way to describe formal languages.

Taken from the wikipedia page [wikipedia.org].

Re:Took a while, didn't it?

John Backus won the award in 1977 [acm.org] though, so it is quite legitimate to ask, as the original poster did, why they didn't recognize Naur sooner.

Naur denies having contributed to BNF

Naur himself denies having invented BNF together with Backus. According to himself, it is the Backus Normal Form. Other people put his name in it.

Re:Took a while, didn't it?

I hear the Turing committee actually has an infinite red tape.

Re:Took a while, didn't it?

The designer of Algol-60 is only getting this recognition in 2006?

Must be why they compare it with the Nobel.

Yes but...

Can he pass the Turing test himself?

There is a saying...

..."Algol 60 is a great improvement on all its successors"

Nice to see Peter getting some recognition.

Re:There is a saying...

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...

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...

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.

I didn't think

I didn't think humans could win this award.

Me, like many readers of slashdot

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

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

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.

One of Peter Naur's Contributions

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...

Just Algol-60?

What about Backus-Naur form?

Re:Just Algol-60?

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},
  }

Sample code

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.

Re:Sample code

Build a macro or some kind of simple code to check FOR you!

I did one in LISP; I'm still trying to find an unmatched (.

From : A grateful computer user

Sir,

I thank you for helping define structured computer programming languages. Programs were the dreams of the wireheads half a century ago. Now, if you can type, we can only hope you never see the dreaded :

SYNTAX ERROR : GOSUB WITHOUT RETURN
LINE 380

Guess what language I learned to program first? :-P

Visualize Whirled P.'s

Datalogy

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...

FAMOUS CONTROVERSY

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.

Algol 60 Group

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

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.)

life::= birth education career gods_waiting_room ;

I have been using his work for years. Congrats to him
and his fantastic career.

Hedley

Danes everywhere...

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.

Re:Danes everywhere...

Anders Hejlsberg made Turbo Pascal as well. Also to name a few other Danes that created popular languages like Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) and David Heinemeier Hansson (Ruby on Rails Framework).

Nobel Games

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."

Why the heck don't the Nobel managers make a fricken Computer category? They created a Economics category even though Mr. Nobel hadn't originally set that one up.
       

Honest question from curious geek-

I just read the WikiPedia article on Alan Turing:

In 1952, Turing was convicted of acts of gross indecency after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo hormone therapy. When Alan Turing died in 1954, an inquest found that he had committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

Then the article mentions an urban legend:

In the book, Zeroes and Ones, author Sadie Plant speculates that the rainbow Apple logo with a bite taken out of it was an homage to Turing. This seems to be an urban legend as the Apple logo was designed in 1976, two years before Gilbert Baker's rainbow pride flag.

Urban Legend? Anyone have any more info on this?

In case you haven't seen it in a while, here is the classic Apple logo:
http://www.jeb.be/images/Apple/apple_logo_(640x480 ).jpg [www.jeb.be].

Re:Honest question from curious geek-

The original Apple logo: http://203.151.217.14/databases/d0002/images/logo1 .jpg [203.151.217.14]

Wait, Turing? Not Turino?

Wow, for a moment there, I thought that they introduced Programming as an Olympic Event in the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino. :o

Re:Obligatory Typo Joke

There's no typo there. Turing's full name is Alan Mathison Turing [wikipedia.org].

Re:Nobel prize for peace[of mind]

Given how much java makes me want to kill people, I don't think that's fair.

Re:Nobel prize for peace[of mind]

Java alone isn't a great invention, it's a C style language with garbage collection, objects and compiles to a bytecode... all that's been done before.

Now maybe the inventor of Java's reflection system...

Re:Nobel prize for peace[of mind]

s/Java/C/;

Fixed your post.

Re:Nobel prize for peace[of mind]

No. Java takes the object oriented paradigm to perfection. C is C, Java is Java. P.S The guy who gave me a -1 overrated should join the assholes-'R-US club.