Barbara Liskov

Solarion

Solarion

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Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939 as Barbara Jane Huberman) is an American computer scientist who is an Institute Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Ford Professor of Engineering in its School of Engineering's electrical engineering and computer science department. She was one of the first women to be granted a doctorate in computer science in the United States and is a Turing award winner who developed the Liskov substitution principle.

Liskov was born November 7, 1939 in Los Angeles, California, the eldest of Jane (née Dickhoff) and Moses Huberman's four children. She earned her BA in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1961. In 1968 she became one of the first women in the United States to be awarded a Ph.D. from a computer science department when she was awarded her degree from Stanford University. The topic of her Ph.D. thesis was a computer program to play chess endgames.

Liskov has led many significant projects, including the Venus operating system, a small, low-cost and interactive timesharing system; the design and implementation of CLU; Argus, the first high-level language to support implementation of distributed programs and to demonstrate the technique of promise pipelining; and Thor, an object-oriented database system. With Jeannette Wing, she developed a particular definition of subtyping, commonly known as the Liskov substitution principle. She leads the Programming Methodology Group at MIT, with a current research focus in Byzantine fault tolerance and distributed computing.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov

Well, there we go. Smart lady.
 
Solarion

Solarion

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etienne_marais said:
True. Sometimes understanding the theory behind the theory is very enlightening.
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+1

It amazes me, these people came along, like Turing for eg and just had a whole different way of looking at programming, a whole fresh perspective. Brilliant minds.

Anyway, busy learning Generics, Lambda's etc and some of the things Spacerat and Roi posted in that regard got me interested in the actual origins of all this.
 
Foxhound5366

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Oh dear, don't let's add rabid scientist hater to my list of attributes. I was just wanting a little context to exactly what was so noteworthy about Barbara right now that she was being shared here, because as we know from art, context is the essential ingredient in appreciation.

I actually watched a fair portion of that video of Barbara's speech, very cool to hear some of those early stories. It makes you wonder how antiquated our current cutting-edge technologies will seem in 50 years.
 
[)roi(]

[)roi(]

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Foxhound5366 said:
Oh dear, don't let's add rabid scientist hater to my list of attributes. I was just wanting a little context to exactly what was so noteworthy about Barbara right now that she was being shared here, because as we know from art, context is the essential ingredient in appreciation.

I actually watched a fair portion of that video of Barbara's speech, very cool to hear some of those early stories. It makes you wonder how antiquated our current cutting-edge technologies will seem in 50 years.
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As for antiquated; most of the new languages (Kotlin, Rust, Swift, ...) have all credited CLU as inspiration for some of their approaches. Watching the videos and knowing the languages it's uncanny how much we are still influenced by these early ideas. Arguably quite a few of the ideas couldn't have been realized until more recently; requiring not only advances in hardware, but also OS, compilers, etc...

Point is, that if the seventies are anything to go by; our influences (and that of the past) will carry forward well into the future...
 
Solarion

Solarion

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Just to expand a little on that roi.

Key contributions include abstract data types, call-by-sharing, iterators, multiple return values (a form of parallel assignment), type-safe parameterized types, and type-safe variant types. It is also notable for its use of classes with constructors and methods, but without inheritance.
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Influence on other programming languages

CLU has influenced many other languages in many ways. In approximate chronological order, these include:

CLU and Ada were major inspirations for C++ templates.

CLU's exception handling mechanisms influenced later languages like C++ and Java.

C++, Sather, Python, and C# include iterators, which first appeared in CLU.

Perl and Lua took multiple assignment and multiple returns from function calls from CLU.

Python and Ruby borrowed several concepts from CLU, such as call by sharing, the yield statement, and multiple assignment[citation needed]
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLU_(programming_language)
 
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