MIT’s Barbara Liskov was awarded the 2008 Association of Computing Machinery Turing Award. The Turning award is the highest distinction in computer science and is often referred to as the Nobel price of computing. Past award winners are listed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_Award.
The full award citation:
Barbara Liskov has led important developments in computing by creating and implementing programming languages, operating systems, and innovative systems designs that have advanced the state of the art of data abstraction, modularity, fault tolerance, persistence, and distributed computing systems.
The Venus operating system was an early example of principled operating system design. The CLU programming language was one of the earliest and most complete programming languages based on modules formed from abstract data types and incorporating unique intertwining of both early and late binding mechanisms. ARGUS extended many of the CLU ideas to distributed programming, and incorporated the first versions of nested transactions to maintain predictable consistencies. Other advances include solutions elegantly combining theory and pragmatics in the areas of decentralized information flow, replicated storage and caching of persistent objects, and modular upgrading of distributed systems. Her contributions have been incorporated into the practice of programming, thereby influencing many of the most important systems used today: for programming, specification, systems design, and distributed architectures.
From: http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1108679&srt=year&year=2008&aw=140&ao=AMTURING
The cover article in the July Communications of the ACM was on the award: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/7/32083-liskovs-creative-joy/fulltext.
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