drscott | Turing Award: Barbara Liskov

That was odd; just listened to an interview on NPR with Barbara Liskov, winner of this year's Turing Award for achievement in computer science.

She mentioned Alan Turing as an innovator in computation and cryptanalysis (awarded an OBE for his secret WW2 services), but left out how anti-gay laws in Britain subjected him to chemical castration and hounded him to suicide in 1954. I've plugged it before, but Alan Turing: The Enigma is a terrific read.

I took a couple of classes with Prof. Liskov and her usual partner John Guttag (who I had a slight crush on.) They were the core of the rather boring program specification and "secure computing" bunch at MIT, as opposed to the fun Scheme group (Hal Abelson, Gerry Sussman) I was associated with.

I programmed my first compiler in her language, CLU, a strongly-typed, nitpicky teaching language that presaged monstrosities like Ada.

The interview was rather painful. She sounded a lot like Dianne Feinstein, and the interviewer was more interested in how it felt to be a woman in a male-dominated field than in any of her work.