Barbary Liskov is the 2008 A.M. Turing Award Recipient

Way to go, Barb!

Your publications on ADTs were so important to forming my thinking as a computer scientist.

Thanks! And blow the money on some fun toys!

Update: Just three weeks ago I was at a software engineering conference at which the speaker showed a slide of the group photo pioneers of software engineering who had been invited to a conference in Bonn in 2002. Where are the women, I asked - not a single one.

The speaker said: but there were women there, and someone sniggered "Yeah, the wives". The speaker racked his brain - Fran Allen had taken sick, Adele Goldberg was unable to travel. "And the others?" I challenged back. But I was relegated to the evening discussion. So I asked where the others were. I named a few such as Mary Shaw and Barb Liskov, and then this discussion broke out as to whether it wasn't Guttag who was the guy who invented all this and Barb's name was just on the publications 'cause she typed up the papers or some such nonsense.

She got the Turing prize. Alone. So does that settle that argument, gentlemen?

Capability Immaturity Model

I was reading through the text for lab next week during this week's lab in software engineering. We'll be doing a Design Pattern Exercise from Bruce Eckel's "Thinking in Patterns". I followed a link he gave on the Capability Immaturity Model and landed on a Wiki.

It is sooooo funny, I laughed until I was doubled over and had tears running down my cheeks. My students looked up at me every now and then, but they think I'm crazy anyway, so they didn't say anything.

I investigated around the site and discovered, this is *the* original Wiki, implemented by Ward Cunningham! There is so much funny stuff here, especially about Extreme Programming, which he apparently also practically invented (but didn't mean it that way). This is a must read for all software people!