Archives for May 2006

The Turing Award

24 May 2006 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

The Turing Award is the considered to be the Nobel Prize of Computing. It is given annually by ACM.

Here are the Turing Award winners:

[ Adleman, Leonard M. ] [ Bachman, Charles W. ] [ Backus, John ] [ Blum, Manuel ] [ Brooks, Frederick P. ] [ Cerf, Vinton G. ] [ Cocke, John ] [ Codd, Edgar F. ] [ Cook, Stephen A. ] [ Corbato, Fernando J. ] [ Dahl, Ole-Johan ] [ Dijkstra, E. W. ] [ Engelbart, Douglas ] [ Feigenbaum, Edward ] [ Floyd, Robert W. ] [ Gray, James ] [ Hamming, Richard ] [ Hartmanis, Juris ] [ Hoare, C. Antony R. ] [ Hopcroft, John ] [ Iverson, Kenneth E. ] [ Kahan, William (Velvel) ] [ Kahn, Robert E. ] [ Karp, Richard M. ] [ Kay, Alan ] [ Knuth, Donald E. ] [ Lampson, Butler W. ] [ McCarthy, John ] [ Milner, Robin ] [ Minsky, Marvin ] [ Naur, Peter ] [ Newell, Allen ] [ Nygaard, Kristen ] [ Perlis, A. J. ] [ Pnueli, Amir ] [ Rabin, Michael O. ] [ Reddy, Raj ] [ Ritchie, Dennis M. ] [ Rivest, Ronald L. ] [ Scott, Dana S. ] [ Shamir, Adi ] [ Simon, Herbert A. ] [ Stearns, Richard E. ] [ Sutherland, Ivan ] [ Tarjan, Robert ] [ Thompson, Ken ] [ Wilkes, Maurice V ] [ Wilkinson, J. H. ] [ Wirth, Niklaus ] [ Yao, Andrew Chi-Chih ]

Only geniuses I tell you… Every single one of them ;-)

Here are the ones I revere (in no particular order): John McCarthy (for LISP!), Edsger Dijkstra (for GOTO statements considered harmful), Donald E. Knuth (look at my previous post…), John Backus (FORTRAN fame and, yes, his contribution to functional programming), Edgar F. Codd (relational algebra and databases of course), Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie (for Unix :-) ), Ivan Sutherland (for Sketchpad), Robin Milner (for his contributions to type theory which has given us Haskell), Douglas Engelbart (for the mouse!!!), Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard (for Object-Orientation and Simula), Alan Kay (for Smalltalk and Squeak) and Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn (for the Internet)…

Two fantastic books I’m currently reading

23 May 2006 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

Selected Papers on Computer Science is written by Donald Knuth (of The Art of Computer Programming & TeX fame) and is (IMHO rightly) considered by some as being the greatest living Computer Scientist. Here is the list of papers in the book:

0. Algorithms, Programs, and CS
1. CS and its Relation to Math
2. Math and CS: Coping with Finiteness
3. Algorithms
4. Algorithms in Modern Math and CS
5. Algorithms Themes
6.-9. Theory and Practice I..IV
10. Are Toy Problems Useful?
11. Ancient Babylonian Algorithms
12. Von Neumann’s First Computer Program (sorting)
13. The IBM 650: An Appreciation from the Field
14. George Forsythe and the Development of Computer Science
15. Artistic Programming

Now, I don’t want to sound too melodramatic but I have to tell you all that this book is unique! All of the papers are very interesting to read and full of insights and small details to make you think. Some of them require a good level of maths but we are supposed to be Computer Scientists, isn’t it?

The second book is Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham (who is currently one of my top 5 sources of inspiration…). This book basically contains (slightly modified) essays that Paul wrote and published on his website. The essays are diverse:

1. Why Nerds Are Unpopular
2. Hackers and Painters
3. What You Can’t Say
4. Good Bad Attitude
5. The Other Road Ahead
6. How to Make Wealth
7. Mind the Gap
8. A Plan for Spam
9. Taste for Makers
10. Programming Languages Explained
11. The Hundred-Year Language
12. Beating the Averages
13. Revenge of the Nerds
14. The Dream Language
15. Design and Research

The essays talk of taste, of “how to make wealth” (and not money!), of LISP as a programming language and everything in between… This is really an inspiring book. Read it and your life will be changed ;-)

Competition for Microsoft

20 May 2006 By Avinash Meetoo Leave a Comment

I’ve just read a brief interview of Microsoft’s vice-president of research, Richard “Rick” Rashid.

In it, he talks about technology, about social networks, about open source software and, more interesting, about the competition for Microsoft:

“You have to write software and build systems with the perspective that you have an adversary and in some cases your adversary has more resources than you do. That’s the situation that’s out there now. It’s a constant battle.” (Emphasis mine)

This is a scoop!

Someone from Microsoft conceeding that “your adversary has more resources than you do”

I’m sure the thousands of twenty year old hackers writing Ajax applications will be delighted to hear that.