Programming Languages Achievement Award

Given by ACM SIGPLAN to recognize an individual or individuals who has made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of programming languages. The contribution can be a single event or a life-time of achievement. The award includes a prize of $5,000. The award is presented at SIGPLAN's PLDI conference the following June.

Nominations

Recipients of the Achievement Award

2012: Matthias Felleisen

The SIGPLAN 2012 Achievement award has been won by Matthias Felleisen, an exemplary researcher whose work covers theory, practice, and education, with each reinforcing the others. He has made fundamental contributions across the entire spectrum of the programming language field. He introduced evaluation contexts as a notation for specifying operational semantics, and progress-and-preservation proofs of type safety, both of which are used in scores of research papers each year, often without citation. His other contributions include small-step operational semantics for control and state, A-normal form, delimited continuations, mixin classes and mixin modules, a fully-abstract semantics for Sequential PCF, web programming techniques, higher-order contracts with blame, and static typing for dynamic languages.

2011: Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare, FRS, FREng, FBCS

Citation

"Tony Hoare's long career in computing is studded with seminal engineering and scientific contributions to Programming Languages; his views on programming language design have been recognized as profound even by those who declined to follow his advice.

Two contributions stand out as fundamental: the development of what is now known as Hoare logic, and Communicating Sequential Processes. Hoare logic is a system for reasoning about imperative programs. It was introduced in the 1969 article "An Axiomatic Basic for Computer Programming", which is perhaps the most influential 6-page paper ever published in CACM. Drawing on earlier work of Robert Floyd, an entire sub-area of computer science has developed from Hoare's initial ideas; many modern verification systems build on Hoare logic.

Only 9 years later, CACM published Hoare's paper on Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). Contemporary with Milner's CCS, but pursuing complementary goals, CSP has been enormously influential. It provided the basis for the occam programming language and its realization in the Transputer; it has been used for modeling and verifying the concurrency properties of critical software systems; and it inspired a flowering of subsequent concurrency research.

Although either of these contributions would alone justify the achievement award, Hoare is doing more with his Unifying Theories research, which aims to unify theories of programming across paradigm, abstraction level and semantic style. Beyond all of this, Tony is renowned for his unfailing courtesy, his inspiration, and his dedication to his chosen calling. He is the epitome of a scholar and a gentleman."

2010: Gordon D. Plotkin

Citation

"Professor Gordon D. Plotkin has made fundamental advances in almost every area of the theory of programming languages. His contributions have helped to establish the mathematical foundations on which the scientific study of programming languages are based. His 1975 paper "Call-by-name, Call-by-value, and the λ-calculus" exposed the relationship between the reduction semantics of the λ-calculus and its operational semantics, as defined by Landin's SECD machine.

2009: Rod Burstall

Citation

"Professor Rod Burstall has made deep, seminal contributions to the design of programming languages and the field of program verification.

2008: Barbara Liskov

Citation

"Professor Barbara Liskov has had tremendous impact on the fields of programming languages, operating systems, distributed systems, and information security. Much of her early research focus was on data abstraction, modularity, and encapsulation as typified by the CLU programming language.

Past Recipients of the Achievement Award

2007: Niklaus Wirth

2006: Ron Cytron, Jeanne Ferrante, Barry Rosen, Mark Wegman, and Kenneth Zadeck

2005: Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides

2004: John Backus

2003: John Reynolds

2002: John McCarthy

2001: Robin Milner

2000: Susan Graham

1999: Ken Kennedy

1998: Fran Allen

1997: Guy Steele