[TUHS] [tuhs] Dennis Ritchie's couch

Nelson H. F. Beebe beebe at math.utah.edu
Wed May 26 10:12:00 AEST 2021


The last article of the latest issue of the Communications of the ACM
that appeared electronically earlier today is a brief interview with
this year's ACM Turing Award winners, Al Aho and Jeff Ullman.

The article is

        Last byte: Shaping the foundations of programming languages
        https://doi.org/10.1145/3460442
        Comm. ACM 64(6), 120, 119, June 2021.

and it includes a picture of the two winners sitting on Dennis
Ritchie's couch.

I liked this snippet from Jeff Ullman, praising fellow list member
Steve Johnson's landmark program, yacc:

>> ...
>> At the time of the first Fortran compiler, it took several
>> person-years to write a parser.  By the time yacc came around, 
>> you could do it in an afternoon.
>> ...

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