On June 15 and 16 of 2012 we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing (June 23, 1912) in San Francisco (http://turing100.acm.org/final_program/tcc_final_program.pdf) with 33 living ACM A.M. Turing Award winners!  It was especially great to see Nicklaus Wirth on the "Programming Languages: Past Achievements and Future Challenges" panel along with Susan Graham, Barbara Liskov and Frances Allen. You can watch the replays of the sessions at http://amturing.acm.org/acm_tcc_webcast...

In 1984, Ken Thompson, the operating system and programming language pioneer, received the ACM's Turing Award. In his short, highly-readable Turing Award speech, he describes "the cutest program I ever wrote." He notes that because the C compiler is written in C, it is possible to alter the source code maliciously to produce a malicious compiler executable. The malicious code can then be removed from the C source, and the original code recompiled. The malicious code remains in the "new" executab...

In 1984, Ken Thompson, the operating system and programming language pioneer, received the ACM's Turing Award. In his short, highly-readable Turing Award speech, he describes "the cutest program I ever wrote." He notes that because the C compiler is written in C, it is possible to alter the source code maliciously to produce a malicious compiler executable. The malicious code can then be removed from the C source, and the original code recompiled. The malicious code remains in the "new" executab...

In the past couple of weeks, I've had occasion to look fairly closely at the ADO.NET Entity Framework, and compare it to NHibernate.  Of course, before I even started, I went out and read what other people had to say on the subject.  Many people point to this post by Danny Simmons as approximating the "official" Microsoft position on the subject, and commenters around the web seem to focus specifically on what Danny calls "a [not yet delivered, but] much larger vision of an entity-aware data pl...

Here are some recent papers which caught my attention. Generally speaking, you need to have a subscription to the ACM's Digital Library to read them, but if one of these seems interesting let me know in comments and I can discuss it in more detail. Dependent classes discusses a somewhat more flexible, proposed alternative to nested classes. The causes of bloat, the limits of health introduces a metric to measure the tradeoff between necessary features and runtime memory footprint. Notat...

I've commented before that journalists don't typically write their own headlines; the editors do, and the editors are often less well-informed about the subject matter than the authors. But this one is a special case: Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it...

I mentioned earlier that the ACM was asking for nominations for classic CS books. The nominations have been received and the ACM has set up a wiki for comments on the books. The intent is to come up with a list of out of print classics for republication....

The ACM just sent me an interesting email: ACM is launching a new initiative to revive classic, out-of-print, computer science books and make them available to members via the Professional Development Center and the Digital Library. Please submit your comments and candidates for CS classics by Friday, October 7, including why you think your nomination(s) qualify as classic(s), by responding to the email invitation you received. After this date we will conduct a vote, resulting in the Top 20 clas...

This month's issue of the Journal of the ACM (subscription) presents an algorithm for in-place sorting which claims at worst O(n log n) comparisons and O(n) moves. From the paper: The Algorithm in a Nutshell Using an evenly distributed sample a1, . . . , af of size Θ(n/(log n)4), split the remaining elements into some segments σ0, σ1, . . . , σf , of length Θ((log n)4) each, so that all elements in the segment σk satisfy ak ≤ a ≤ ak+1. The sorted ar...

From time to time folks see fit to publish lists of what the general priorities for developing a software project should be. The funny thing about these lists is that almost all of them omit what I consider to be the number one priority.Update: Link fixed....