Lambda the Ultimate

• Contributions to Smalltalk and dynamic language style.
• Invention of CRC card-based design.
• Progenitor of use of patterns in software development.
• Progenitor of extreme programming and other agile ideas.
• Inventor of the original WikiWiki web.
• All around guru of simplicity, e.g. his new FIT test framework.

http://www.c2.com/doc/pages.html http://www.c2.com/doc/index.html http://fit.c2.com

-Patrick

But while we are on the subject, how does FIT relate to xUnit, if at all?

Think about it.

IMHO math will be the key to bug free portable definitions and will finally make it such that most programming work exemplifies new and unique contributions of ideas and not the millionth reinvention of some oft-used wheel. But unfortunately the award will probably go to some flashy pop-star celebrity type which will rule Philip Wadler out, I guess.

Joe Armstrong, the principal designer of Erlang, because he actually tried, and succeeded, at getting functional programming used in industry. Back when the original project started in 1983, looking to such extremely high level languages was a gutsy move. Heck, at the time the average PC ran at 4.77MHz. More recent languages, like Python, seem downright conservative in comparison.

I'd love to nominate Ken Iverson and Roger Hui for J, but it's such a hugely esoteric language, and I find it much less useful than other languages (despite its beauty).

I did. If there's a joke here, I don't get it.

Carl Hewitt, for the original PLANNER and PLASMA ideas, with which we are still striving towards the future of programming lanugages and computing.

I'll see if I can think of any more.

Alex Stepanov for his work on generics. STL, which resulted from his efforts, is now a standard part of the C++ language. BTW, here is an interesting interview with him that appeared in DDJ. Some quotes from this article:

We started working on a language called Tecton, which would allow people to describe algorithms associated with what we called generic structures ... There were some interesting ideas, but the research didn't lead to practical results because Tecton was functional. We believed Backus's idea that we should liberate programming from the von Neumann style, and we didn't want to have side effects. That limited our ability to handle very many algorithms that require the notion of state and side effects.

And

switching from a dynamically typed language, such as Scheme, to a strongly typed language, such as Ada, allowed me to realize the importance of strong typing. Everybody realizes that strong typing helps in catching errors. I discovered that strong typing, in the context of Ada generics, was also an instrument of capturing designs.

Another designer is Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi and now the chief designer of the C# programming language and a key participant in the development of the .NET Framework. I cannot exaggerate the effect Turbo Pascal had on me as a programmer. Having a fast and friendly IDE and compiler that fit on a single diskette and worked on a PC XT was simply amazing. Compilations that took 10 minutes on the University's VAX flew by in a few seconds on my PC at home. Basically it let me move up from assembly to a high level PL.

The parts of computer science that rely on math seem to have the highest levels of reliability.

Once the theory behind them is complete they seem to serve as a foundation that is used over and over again.

Take for instance the use of boolean logic in cpu and alu design or the theory of formal languages in parser design.

Those parts that don't rely on math, like mainstream software development, seem to be easily swayed by fads that boom and fade rather quickly, like CASE methodologies in the 1980's....or.....

Quantum computing might eventually overtake boolean logic and the Von Neuman machine and solve some currently intractable problems, but boolean logic will not die in 8 years like most programming languages will.

The lambda calculus, combinators and higher order functions like fold and unfold serve the same function as boolean logic in functional programming.

I don't think the Lambda Calculus is going to die in 8 years. she will still be there hemming and hawing, taking a long draw on her cigarette, staring wearily off in the distance: "I've been waiting for you honey, for an eternity. What took you so long to realize I was the only one for you?"

There is nothing like boolean logic for the imperative programming paradigm.

The columns of assignment statements that populate most programs are not an adequate substitute as Backus's Turing Award Lecture points out.

Math is the ultimate quality control.

Anything of enduring value involves mathematics.

Pythagoras, Isoceles, and Dijkstra, do you agree?

For software I actually do know and use, Emacs all the way :-). I guess that means Stallman, though I suspect the people who did Emacsen in between the TECO one and the GNU one pioneered a whole lot of the nice stuff I love about Emacs. A particularly fascinating paper is the history of Multics Emacs: http://www.multicians.org/mepap.html

According to the Emacs Timeline at http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html, GNU Emacs was actually the seventh Emacs to be written.

Ran on a virtual machine long before Java was invented and hyped.

Allows code upgrade during runtime.

Incorporated IP based distribution long before the masses knew what IP meant.

Relies on extensive usage of design patterns.

Is used on a wide scale with many success stories.

However, it is not inappropriate to honor people who have had a major impact via language design.

• John McCarthy for LISP and Algol 60.

• Peter J. Landin for ISWIM, the first functional language (see page 29 of Paulson's notes for a comparison with LISP; also see Wadler's tribute, and the original).

• Niklaus Wirth for the Pascal family.

• Guy Steele for Scheme, Java and other contributions.

• Donald Knuth for TeX which, although I believe it is a terrible programming language, is useful and practical, was ground-breaking and is still without equal.

• Robin Milner for ML, LCF, CCS and the pi-calculus.

• John Backus for Fortran, Algol 60 and FP.

I picked these people based not only on the worth and impact of their contributions, but also their originality. Oh, and almost all of them are Turing Award winners, but surely that's coincidental...! :)