Slashdot Log In
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.
from the celebrating-people-who-deserve-it dept.
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."
Related Stories
[+]
Science: ACM to Honor TCP/IP Creators with Turing Award 143 comments
bth writes "The New York Times reports that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn will receive the ACM Turing Award. According to the ACM website: The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn the winners of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols." Commentary from Groklaw also available.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Peter Naur Wins 2005 Turing Award
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 135 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Took a while, didn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 05 2006, @05:31AM)
-jcr
Re:Took a while, didn't it? (Score:4, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
(http://floodle.org/)
Naur denies having contributed to BNF (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Took a while, didn't it? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Took a while, didn't it? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://netapps.com.au/)
Must be why they compare it with the Nobel.
Yes but... (Score:1, Funny)
There is a saying... (Score:4, Funny)
Nice to see Peter getting some recognition.
Re:There is a saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
(http://billposer.org/)
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)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://godgab.org/)
Me, like many readers of slashdot (Score:2, Funny)
(http://wurzel.fortunecity.de/ | Last Journal: Friday January 27 2006, @04:14PM)
Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia, the Turing test passes you.
Re:Me, like many readers of slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
(Last Journal: Saturday October 14 2006, @08:12AM)
You passed the test. No computer would mangle the pronoun usage like this!
Re:Me, like many readers of slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
(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 (Score:2, Funny)
(http://nedry.ytmnd.com/)
Just Algol-60? (Score:2)
Re:Just Algol-60? (Score:4, Informative)
@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 (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Monday October 11 2004, @09:43PM)
I think I would have been driven nuts trying to find the unmatched ' in my code.
Re:Sample code (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday October 11 2004, @09:43PM)
I did one in LISP; I'm still trying to find an unmatched (.
From : A grateful computer user (Score:1)
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?
Visualize Whirled P.'s
Datalogy (Score:5, Interesting)
FAMOUS CONTROVERSY (Score:2)
(http://www.thebrickt...assacre/jg21_11.html | Last Journal: Tuesday December 20 2005, @06:19AM)
http://spirit.sourceforge.net/dl_docs/bnf.html [sourceforge.net]
Some accuse this guy of bogarting the credit.
Algol 60 Group (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://www.jehochman.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday March 12 2006, @09:09PM)
Some contributions of Algol60 (Score:5, Informative)
(http://basepath.com/)
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 ; (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 20 2003, @10:39PM)
and his fantastic career.
Hedley
Danes everywhere... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Danes everywhere... (Score:4, Informative)
Nobel Games (Score:1)
(http://www.geocities.com/tablizer | Last Journal: Saturday March 15 2003, @01:22PM)
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- (Score:2, Interesting)
(http://joshthejenius.com/)
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_(640x48
Re:Honest question from curious geek- (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait, Turing? Not Turino? (Score:1)
Re:Obligatory Typo Joke (Score:1)
Re:Nobel prize for peace[of mind] (Score:2)
(http://www.sdonag.plus.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday June 07 2006, @04:05AM)
Re:Nobel prize for peace[of mind] (Score:2)
Now maybe the inventor of Java's reflection system...
Re:Nobel prize for peace[of mind] (Score:2)
Fixed your post.
Re:Nobel prize for peace[of mind] (Score:1)