Alan Kay Receives ACM Turing Award 120
TheAncientHacker writes "Alan Kay, the creator of the Smalltalk computer language (and a good deal of what we call Object Oriented Programming) is the winner of this year's Turing Award from the ACM. Kay is also the co-winner of this year's Charles Stark Draper Prize. For more, check out the website of Kay's latest project, Squeak - an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation go to the Squeak homepage or the page of the SqueakLand community which uses Squeak in schools. For more on Kay's Turing Award, see this article on the SqueakLand site." Couple of other awards to announce: bth writes "The Association for Computing Machinery announced that it has recognized Dr. Stuart I. Feldman for creating a seminal piece of software engineering known as Make. Almost every software developer in the world has used Make, or one of its descendants, as a tool for maintaining computer software. Dr. Feldman will receive the 2003 ACM Software System Award." And finally, squidfrog writes "Nick Holonyak Jr., inventor of the LED, is being awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony in Washington. Edith Flanigen, 75, was also recognized, with the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for her work on a new generation of 'molecular sieves,' porous crystals that can separate molecules by size."
I invented the term! (Score:5, Funny)
A lot of the developers and managers at Apple were gathered around watching a presentation from someone about some "wonderful" new product that would save the world. All through the presentation, he had been stating that the product was "object-oriented" while he blathered on.
Finally, someone at the back of the room piped up:
"So, this product doesn't support inheritance, right?"
"that's right".
"And it doesn't support polymorphism, right?"
"that's right"
"And it doesn't support encapsulation, right?"
"that's correct".
"So, it doesn't seem to me like it's object-oriented".
To which the presenter huffily responded,
"Well, who's to say what's object-oriented and what's not?"
At this point the person replied,
"I am. I'm AlanKay and I invented the term."
Nick Holonyak Jr., inventor of the LED (Score:2, Funny)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:5, Funny)
...and my CS professor StephenKeckler was just awarded the GraceHopper award.
Are you an overworked sysadmin? Do you manually assign so many logins that you normalize all full names?
Magical Microsoft Moments. (Score:5, Funny)
I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.
One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.
Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.
The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.
The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and shouldwork quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs--the author of the Korn shell.
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence.
He also said.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ObQuote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ObQuote (Score:5, Funny)
Make! (Score:3, Funny)
Make! Just about time. We would be ants without it.
Dr. Stuart I. Feldman deserves the award but... (Score:3, Funny)
yes, it was a joke
Re:ObQuote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ObQuote (Score:5, Funny)
- attributed to Edsger Dijkstra [wikipedia.org]
Re:I HATE Dr. Stuart I. Feldman !!! (Score:3, Funny)
Re:There's no justice I tell you! (Score:5, Funny)
Thank goodness for Ant.
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<gerund value="programming"></gerund>
<preposition value="in"></preposition>
<acronym value="XML"></acronym>
<verb value="is"></verb>
<adverb value="much"></adverb>
<adverb value="less"></adverb>
<adjective value="awkward"></adjective>
</reply>
Re:I invented the (language)! (Score:4, Funny)
"Maybe they're ashamed of it!" quipped my friend, in reply.
Another (better informed) friend quickly pulled him aside and explained that Grace had been one of the prime movers in the design of Cobol.
He should be higly pleased (Score:5, Funny)