Peter Naur Wins 2005 Turing Award 135
An anonymous reader writes "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Peter Naur the winner of the 2005 A.M. Turing Award. The award is for Dr. Naur's fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of Algol 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming. The Turing Award is considered to be the Nobel Prize of computing, and a well-deserved recognition of Dr. Naur's pioneering contributions to the field."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
life::= birth education career gods_waiting_room ; (Score:3, Insightful)
and his fantastic career.
Hedley
Re:There is a saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is code reuse. 95% of what we do on a daily basis is to reinvent features available elsewhere. What we need are well designed, easy to use libraries that we can leverage and have most of the work done for us. Closed source programs are killing us, as we can't leverage off each other. Its like going back to the days of Newton and Liebnitz and requiring all mathematicians to prove the same ideas without reference to one another's work before moving on. Its ridiculous, and its the reason for our problems.
Re:There is a saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
It is much more difficult to master and retain the syntax of some languages than of others, so a lot of the time you aren't going to know them equally well. In any case, I think you're just wrong about language not making a difference. It is much slower to write in a low-level language than in a high-level language. Sure, you may have mastered the syntax, but you still have to spend time and mental energy keeping track of what goes where if you don't have data structures like structs and arrays, and just adding automatic storage allocation and garbage collection saves a lot of time and bugs.
Re:There is a saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
Garbage collection is a whole other rant- thats a complete strawman. Memory management takes a minor amount of time (almost 0), and making sure you properly null out dangling references in Java takes about as much. I find the problem to be totally different- there's a subset of programmers who just don't understand memory management. These people suck as programmers- everything you do in programming is resource management. Memory- alloc, use, free. Files- open, use, close. Networking- connect,use,close. Having people who don't understand that pattern on your team causes work to slow down by large amounts because of their incompetnece, not because of the language.
Re:There is a saying... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you've got macros in assembler with macros that make structs and arrays easy, you're not writing real assembler but one of those new-fangled intermediate languages. That's a step up right there.
Anyhow, its the storage allocation that is the big thing. I just don't agree that it makes such a small difference. It isn't just the need to free up what you use - that's relatively easy. It's the constant checking of whether you've got enough or need to reallocate, and the sometimes complicated and error-prone calculations of how much you need.
I'm a very experienced C-programmer (24 years) and the storage allocation idioms reside in my fingertips, yet when dealing with a lot of variable length strings, for example, I know that it is much faster to write in a high-level language like Tcl than in C. And studies of programmers seem to show this quantitatively.
Another feature that I suspect is helpful, if not in making things go faster, in reducing the expenditure of mental energy, is the use of iterators like foreach. Being able to iterate over a list without having to worry about what the first index is and what the last index is etc. as with a C-style for makes it much easier.
Re:There is a saying... (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. A quick download of a few libraries to help out (a database access library, a regex library, a better string library, maybe one or two others) and I'm ready to go. Rails is a particularly poor example- yeah, it autogenerates a lot of code, but if you want to go even slightly out of lockstep with it, you have a lot of fighting against it to do.
Of course. But I don't think I overstated by much. Much of what we do daily is reinvent the wheel. Usually poorly (if we were inventing a better wheel I wouldn't complain). New languages aren't going to boost our productivity, not compared to the boost we'd get from not having to write the damn code in the first place.
Re:Nobel Games (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll grant that there are many conflicting models in macro. Many of them stem from the assumptions. For example, assuming a closed economy or an open economy. In the real world and throughout history, various countries are somewhere in between, but often closer to one or the other. Thus, choosing appropriate assumptions for the question you're asking is very important.
Beyond that, macro is very, very new. Physics had centuries from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein. The point is we can gather data and test these models for their effectiveness. Some of them work, and they tend to persist, and some of them don't (but again, choosing which model is appropriate for which data is very important). Besides, if you're a big fan of micro, there's a huge trend in macro to have the models based on micro foundations. Regarding economics as a science, see my other post [slashdot.org] in this thread.
Even if you don't like certain aggregate variables (GDP, etc), some macroeconomic variables are decided in the real world regardless (how much money to print, what interest rate the Fed sets). Macroeconomics will always exist in that sense. There's certainly plenty of room for improvement in the collection of data (especially of non-OECD countries), but that's true of micro as well.
Agreed. I have high respect for both the Turing Award and the Field's Medal. Note that neither of them call themselves the Nobel Prize.
Neither of them are decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences [wikipedia.org]. I wouldn't mind if everyone called it the Nobel Memorial Prize [wikipedia.org] or something to that effect. If it didn't exist, there would probably be some "top prize" similar to the Field's Medal or Turing Award, and that'd be fine too (there probably was before 1968).
Re:There is a saying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Other than disagreement, I'm not sure WTF you're trying to say here. Try to stick to one rant at a time, and you'll make much more sense.
True, to some extent. Point a gun at my head and tell me to program Lisp and I'll do so more slowly than C. This is not due to flaws in Lisp, but due to the fact that the syntax is not familar to me. As I said, my point is that when EQUALLY experienced with the syntax of 2 languages then there is no difference. Its not Lisp or C or Java or ASM that causes us to be slower programmers, its our unfamiliarity with it. My point is that its nothing inherent in the language that slows us down, and nothing inherent in some other language will speed us up. Its 100% a matter of familiarity. Looking for some new language which will magicly make you more productive is a wild goose chase.
Re:There is a saying... (Score:3, Insightful)