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Liskov's list of papers

Ralph Johnson posted the list of papers that Liskov mentioned as having influence her.

A good place to start as any, I'd say.

By Ehud Lamm at 2009-10-30 07:23 | History | other blogs | 13151 reads

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Reasoning about code

The first paper, or at least the way it was presented, caught my eye:

Djikstra [sic] - "Goto Statement Considered harmful" - which raised the innovative claim that programs ought to be easy to reason about, and language elements that made them hard to reason about were bad

Surely, I thought, several people on the Algol 60 committee cared about this, and wasn't McCarthy's case for lexical scope based on such grounds? But I'm damned if I can find sources for this.

The Landin/Strachey/Scott crowd were, of course, very much concerned with the meaning of programs, and one of the advantages Strachey claimed for formal semantics of programming languages is that it offered the programmer a basis for reasoning about their own code. But I get the sense that Dijkstra's concern was a little different, and less focussed on formalism.

By Charles Stewart at Fri, 2009-10-30 12:29 | login or register to post comments

Difference in emphasis

It sounds like earlier work was focused on making it possible to reason about code, but Dijkstra wanted it to be easy. A matter of UI, really.

By John Stracke at Fri, 2009-10-30 14:31 | login or register to post comments

Links

(Some of these are behind the ACM's paywall. Sorry, but I was mostly pulling these together for my own use, and I have a subscription, so I didn't want to spend the time to dig down other versions.)

By John Stracke at Fri, 2009-10-30 15:10 | login or register to post comments

Thanks. Locating the LtU

Thanks. Locating the LtU discussions on the papers (I think we discussed most, but not all of them), would be nice. Some are pretty hard to find, but I remember that they were mentioned here.

By Ehud Lamm at Sun, 2009-11-01 05:29 | login or register to post comments

Slides & Video

The slides from her talk is available from her website. PDF

Video for OOPSLA Keynote: The Power Of Abstraction is available now.
Summary:

In a reprise of her ACM Turing Award lecture, Barbara Liskov discusses the invention of abstract data types, the CLU programming language, clusters, polymorphism, exception handling, iterators, implementation inheritance, type hierarchies, the Liskov Substitution Principle, polymorphism, and future challenges such as new abstractions, parallelism, and the Internet.

By bashyal at Wed, 2009-11-11 21:33 | login or register to post comments