Given by ACM SIGPLAN
to an institution or individual(s) to recognize the development a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools. The impact may be reflected in the wide-spread adoption of the system or its underlying concepts by the wider programming language community either in research projects, in the open-source community, or commercially. The award includes a prize of $2,500. The award is presented at SIGPLAN's PLDI conference the following June.
2011: Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow of Microsoft Research, Cambridge, for GHC
The cash prize is being donated to haskell.org
Citation
"Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow receive the SIGPLAN Software Award as the authors of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC), which is the preeminent lazy functional programming system for industry, teaching, and research. GHC has not only provided a language implementation, but also established the whole paradigm of lazy functional programming and formed the foundation of a large and enthusiastic user community.
GHC's flexibility has supported experimental research on programming language design in areas as diverse as monads, generalized algebraic data types, rank-N polymorphism, and software transactional memory. Indeed, a large share of the research on lazy functional programming in the last 5-10 years has been carried out with GHC.
Simultaneously, GHC's reliability and efficiency has encouraged commercial adoption, in the financial sector in institutions like Credit Suisse and Standard Chartered Bank, and for high assurance software in companies like Amgen, Eaton, and Galois.
A measure of GHC's influence is the way that many of the ideas of purely functional, "typeful programming" have been carried into newer languages and language features. including C#, F#, Java Generics, LINQ, Perl 6, Python, and Visual Basic 9.0. Peyton Jones and Marlow have been visionary in the way that they have transitioned research into practice. They have been role models and leaders in creating the large and diverse Haskell community, and have made GHC an industrial-strength platform for commercial development as well as for research."
2010: Chris Lattner
Citation
"Chris Lattner receives the SIGPLAN Software Award as the author of the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure, which has had a dramatic impact on our field. LLVM is being used extensively in both products and research, for traditional and non-traditional compiler problems, and for a diverse set of languages. LLVM has had a significant influence on academic research, not just in compilers but also in other areas, such as FPGA design tool. Many researchers cite the "elegance of LLVM's design" as one of the reasons for using LLVM. LLVM has also had an impact on industrial projects and products; it is used at major companies including Apple and Google. For example, LLVM is an integral part of Apple's software stack in Mac OS X. Furthermore, as with academic research, LLVM is finding its way into unexpected applications of compiler technology. In summary, LLVM has had an incredible impact on both industry and academia and its elegance has enabled it to be used for a wide range of applications."
