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Programming

Turing Award Goes To Creators of Computer Programming Building Blocks (nytimes.com) 48

Posted by msmash from the time-for-recognition dept.
Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho developed many of the fundamental concepts that researchers use when they build new software. From a report: When Alfred Aho and Jeffrey Ullman met while waiting in the registration line on their first day of graduate school at Princeton University in 1963, computer science was still a strange new world. Using a computer required a set of esoteric skills typically reserved for trained engineers and mathematicians. But today, thanks in part to the work of Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman, practically anyone can use a computer and program it to perform new tasks. On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, said Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman would receive this year's Turing Award for their work on the fundamental concepts that underpin computer programming languages. Given since 1966 and often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize, which the two academics and longtime friends will split. Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman helped refine one of the key components of a computer: the "compiler" that takes in software programs written by humans and turns them into something computers can understand.

Over the past five decades, computer scientists have built increasingly intuitive programming languages, making it easier and easier for people to create software for desktops, laptops, smartphones, cars and even supercomputers. Compilers ensure that these languages are efficiently translated into the ones and zeros that computers understand. Without their work, "we would not be able to write an app for our phones," said Krysta Svore, a researcher at Microsoft who studied with Mr. Aho at Columbia University, where he was chairman of the computer science department. "We would not have the cars we drive these days." The researchers also wrote many textbooks and taught generations of students as they defined how computer software development was different from electrical engineering or mathematics. "Their fingerprints are all over the field," said Graydon Hoare, the creator of a programming language called Rust. He added that two of Dr. Ullman's books were sitting on the shelf beside him. After leaving Princeton, both Dr. Aho, a Canadian by birth who is 79, and Dr. Ullman, a native New Yorker who is 78, joined the New Jersey headquarters of Bell Labs, which was then one of the world's leading research labs.
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Turing Award Goes To Creators of Computer Programming Building Blocks More

Turing Award Goes To Creators of Computer Programming Building Blocks

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  • Cool dragon on the cover too.

    • However it was not a book you could read and then you would know how to write a compiler.

      You work that out elsewhere and look up the dragon book for details on things like when you need to define a pushdown finite state automata or some such nonsense.

    • It was called "The Dragon Book" by everyone in my college. I still have it sitting on a bookshelf in my home, and it has always been with me for 41 years.

  • "A" in "Awk" is for "Aho" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StupendousMan ( 69768 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @09:19AM (#61220490) Homepage

    Thanks, Mr. Aho. Awk has saved my bacon many, many times. I still use it several times a week.

    • Out of curiosity, why awk and not perl? More convenient one-lining? Or...etc.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by nagora ( 177841 )

        A lot of times the -F flag and then "print $F[xxx]" is more hassle than just "{print $1}".

        I do use Perl for a lot of things but awk and sed one-liners are frequently just a little quicker to dash off when digging through some output.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cas2000 ( 148703 )

          OTOH, awk can't actually delete a column(*) and doesn't have built-in join() or splice() functions - all of which are pretty damn useful when manipulating input records consisting of multiple fields.

          You can write join and splice functions for awk, but then you lose the quickness advantage.

          (*) you can kind of fake it with "$0=$0;$1=$1" trickery, but that has side-effects that are sometimes undesirable.

          BTW, I've got nothing against awk. I use it all the time. I probably use awk more than perl these days, even

      • In part, as described by the other commenter, because the number of characters needed to type to carry out a simple task is often smaller for awk than for perl. But mostly because I started using awk before Perl existed ... so I just keep using it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by oddtodd ( 125924 )

          I discovered awk just before perl hit the streets, when I first tried perl it was like awk on steroids.
          I continued to use awk as well as perl, right tool for the job and all that.
          Just a month or so ago I whipped up an awk script but I had to google for some syntax refreshers, been too long for the appropriate synapses to survive.
          Sorry, just havin a senior moment...

        • I learned AWK before Perl existed and so use it in part because I learned it first and have a codebase in AWK. But I also found, when I tried Perl, that I didn't like it. Perl has some features that AWK doesn't, but AWK is much cleaner. Perl has too many weird bits and relies too much on tricks. After reading the book I tried writing real programs in Perl a couple of times but broke off the effort because it just wasn't to my taste. When I want more than AWK offers in an interpreted language, e.g. more s
      • On Windows (ugh), awk is available as a single binary [sourceforge.net] or available in busybox [frippery.org].

  • Great contributions, but ludicrous claims (Score:5, Insightful)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @09:29AM (#61220526)

    It is obvious these guys made great contributions to our art, but to suggest as Krysta Svore does "Without their work, we would not be able to write an app for our phones", is ridiculous hype that does a disservice to their work.

    • I think the key concept here that you are confusing is "without their work" vs "without *them*". Surely something like the computer programming languages that we now know would still exist without these particular individuals.... but C-like languages would not exist without foundational work in compilers. It's the work that is fundamental, as a close reading of the credit makes clear.

    • Re:Great contributions, but ludicrous claims (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tgeek ( 941867 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2021 @10:25AM (#61220728)
      Well, the work they did on compilers had to be done by somebody . . . since it was done by them, I'd say let 'em have all the praise anybody wants to heap on them.

    • It depends. If you mean that if they did not do it, then someone else would, then sure, that seems extremely likely. If you mean that we could do things like the apps on our phone without something like a compiler, then no, that is absurd. I think he is talking about the second interpretation while you are talking about the first.

      • If you mean that we could do things like the apps on our phone without something like a compiler, then no, that is absurd.

        Seeing as they didn't invent compilers, I'm not sure how you could interpret that statement like this.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by haruchai ( 17472 )

          If you mean that we could do things like the apps on our phone without something like a compiler, then no, that is absurd.

          Seeing as they didn't invent compilers, I'm not sure how you could interpret that statement like this.

          Well played!

    • It is obvious these guys made great contributions to our art, but to suggest as Krysta Svore does "Without their work, we would not be able to write an app for our phones", is ridiculous hype that does a disservice to their work.

      Really? If no one had invented the concept of a compiler (or interpreter) of a high level programming language and we were still writing all code in assembler, do you really think computing would be anywhere close to where it is? I think our code would be more compact and efficient, but it would be able to do far, far less.

      • If no one had invented the concept of a compiler (or interpreter) of a high level programming language and we were still writing all code in assembler, do you really think computing would be anywhere close to where it is?

        Fortran was developed in the 1950s, and it is considered the first fully compiled programming language. The article implies that these these guys did their groundbreaking work in 1963 or later. I'm sure they made some significant contributions to computing, but it's not the idea of compilers, and the article doesn't tell any better.

        • If no one had invented the concept of a compiler (or interpreter) of a high level programming language and we were still writing all code in assembler, do you really think computing would be anywhere close to where it is?

          Fortran was developed in the 1950s, and it is considered the first fully compiled programming language. The article implies that these these guys did their groundbreaking work in 1963 or later. I'm sure they made some significant contributions to computing, but it's not the idea of compilers, and the article doesn't tell any better.

          Hmm... yeah, you're right, the article says they "refined" the idea of a compiler, but doesn't say what they did exactly.

          The ACM writeup helps a little:

          Aho and Ullman have shaped the foundations of programming language theory and implementation, as well as algorithm design and analysis. They made broad and fundamental contributions to the field of programming language compilers through their technical contributions and influential textbooks. Their early joint work in algorithm design and analysis techniqu

        • Myself, I consider the Laning and Zierler system [computerhistory.org] (1952) the earliest practical software artifact of this class running on an actual computer. When it comes to theory, Zuse had some relevant ideas and his pupil Rutishauser came up with his thesis titled Automatische Rechenplanfertigung bei programmgesteuerten Rechenmaschinen (Automated construction of computation plans for program-controlled computers?) in 1951, but that thesis to my knowledge is not available online. Corrado Bohm in the same year came up wi

  • Surprised it took this long... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    If the Turing award has been given since '66 I would imaging that their would should have been recognized as being excruciatingly significant since, say.. oh 1980.

    And not to discount the contributions and justifiable awards to luminaries such as Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Kay, etc. but Dr. Aho and Dr. Ullman's award is long, long, over-due.

    That Grace Hopper is missing from the list is a slight equivalent to Gandhi being missed for the Nobel Peace Prize.

  • Says congratulations and thank you Dr. Aho!!!!
  • Though the break-up of AT&T was a popular move, the US lost most of Bell Labs since they were funded by AT&T when it was in a non-competitive environment. Bell Labs brought us many interesting things - Unix, C, AWK, the transistor, research leading to the big bang theory, among others. It was a privately funded organization that allowed pure research to take place, without dictating what direction it had to take (such as modern drug companies).

  • Cars (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    "We would not have the cars we drive these days."

    I, for one, don't want the cars we drive today. The general public hasn't figured out yet that putting computers and software in cars is bad - it's basically a con job to get people to replace their cars more frequently due to aged-out software becoming broken or undesirable/unfashionable features. Billy-Bob-Ray John says, "My new Bluetooth 9 phone won't pair with my cumby Bluetooth 4 car. Time to upgrade!"

    As a software engineer I see software bugs in current

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