Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

In November of 2005, as part of the festivities of its 150-th anniversary, the ETH Zurich bestowed honorary doctorates on Don Knuth and Barbara Liskov. I gave the speech (the “laudatio”). It was published in Informatik Spektrum, the journal of Gesellschaft für Informatik, the German Computer Society, vo. 29, no. 1, February 2006, pages 74-76; I came across it recently and thought others might be interested in this homage to two great computer scientists.  The beginning was in German; I translated it into English. I also replaced a couple of German expressions by their translations: “ETH commencement” for ETH-Tag (the official name of the annual ceremony) and “main building” for Hauptgebäude.

I took this picture of Wirth, Liskov and Knuth (part of my gallery of computer scientists)  later that same day.

Laudatio

 In an institution, Ladies and Gentlement, which so proudly celebrates its hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, a relatively young disciplines sometimes has cause for envy. We computer scientists are still the babies, or at least the newest kids on the block. Outside of this building, for example, you will see streets bearing such names as Clausius, yet there is neither a Von Neumann Lane nor a a Wirth Square. Youth, however,  also has its advantages; perhaps the most striking is that we still can, in our own lifetime, meet in person some of the very founders of our discipline. No living physicist has seen Newton; no chemist has heard Lavoisier. For us, it works. Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have the honor of introducing two of the undisputed pioneers of informatics.

Barbara Liskov

The first of our honorees today is Professor Barbara Liskov. To understand her contributions it is essential to realize the unfair competition in which the so-called Moore’s law pits computer software against computing hardware. To match the astounding progress of computing speed and memory over the past five decades, all that we have on the software side is our own intelligence which, it is safe to say, doesn’t double every eighteen months at constant price. The key to scaling up is abstraction; all advances in programming methodology have relied on new abstraction techniques. Perhaps the most significant is data abstraction, which enables us to organize complex systems on the basis of the types of objects they manipulate, defined in completely abstract terms. This is the notion of abstract data type, a staple component today of every software curriculum, including in the very first programming course here ETH. it was introduced barely thirty years ago in a seemingly modest article in SIGPLAN Notices — the kind of publication that hardly registers a ripple in science indexes — by Barbara Liskov and Stephen Zilles. Few papers have had a more profound impact on the theory and practice of software development than this contribution, “Programming with Abstract Data Types”.

The idea of abstract data types, or ADTs, is one of those Egg of Christopher Columbus moments; a seemingly simple intuition that changes the course of things. An ADT is a class of objects described in terms not of their internal properties, but of the operations applicable to them, and the abstract properties of these operations. Not by what they are, but by what they have. A rather capitalistic view of the world, but well suited to the description of complex systems where each part knows as little as possible about the others to protect itself about their future changes.

An abstraction such as ETH-Commencement could be described in a very concrete way: it happens in a certain place, consists of one event after another, gathers so many people. This is what we computer scientists call an implementation-oriented view, and relying on it means that we can’t change any detail without endangering the consistency of other processes, such as the daily planning of room allocation in the Main Building, which use it. In an ADT view, the abstraction “ETH Commencement” is characterized not by what it is but by what it has: a start, an end, an audience, and operations such as “Schedule the ETH Commencement”, “ Reschedule it”, “Start it”, “End it”. They provide to the rest of the world a clean, precisely specified interface which enables every ADT to use every other based on the minimum properties it requires, thus isolating them from irrelevant internal changes, and providing an irreplaceable weapon in the incessant task of software engineering: battling complexity.

Barbara Liskov didn’t stay with the theoretical concepts but implemented the ideas in the CLU language, one of the most influential of the set of programming languages that in the nineteen-seventies changed our perspective of how to develop good software.

She went on to seminal work on operating systems and distributed computing, introducing several widely applied concepts such as guardians, and always backing her theoretical innovations by building practical systems, from the CLU language and compiler to the Argus and Mercury distributed operating systems. Distributed systems, such as those which banks, airlines and other global enterprises run on multiple machines across multiple networks, raise particularly challenging issues. To quote from the introduction of her article on Argus:

A centralized system is either running or crashed, but a distributed system may be partly running and partly crashed. Distributed programs must cope with failures of the underlying hardware. Both the nodes and the network may fail. The goal of Argus is to provide mechanisms that make it easier for programmers to cope with these problems.

Barbara Liskov’s work introduced seminal concepts to deal with these extremely difficult problems.

Now Ford professor of engineering at MIT, she received not long ago the prestigious John von Neumann award of the IEEE; she has been one of the most influential people in software engineering. We are grateful for how Professor Barbara Liskov has helped shape the field are honored to have her at ETH today.

 Donald Knuth

In computer science and beyond, the name of Donald Knuth carries a unique aura. A professor at Stanford since 1968, now emeritus, he is the only person on record whose job title is the title of his own book: Professor of the Art of Computer Programming. This is for his eponymous multi-volume treatise, which established the discipline of algorithm analysis, and has had more effect than any other computer science publication. The Art of Computer Programming is a marvel of breadth, depth, completeness, mathematical rigor and clarity, not to forget humor. In that legendary book you will find exposed in detail the algorithms and data structures that lie at the basis of all software applications today. A Monte Carlo simulation, as a physicists may use, requires a number sequence that is both very long and very random-looking, even though the computer is a deterministic machine; if the simulation is any good, it almost certainly relies on the devious techniques which The Art of Computer Programming presents for making a perfectly deterministic sequence appear to have no order or other recognizable property. If you are running complex programs on your laptop, and they keep creating millions of software objects without clogging up gigabytes of memory, chances are the author of the garbage collector program is using techniques he learned from Knuth, with such delightful names as “the Buddy System”. If your search engine can at the blink of an eye find a needle of useful information in a haystack of tens of billions of Web pages, it’s most likely because they’ve been indexed using finely tuned data structures, such as hash tables, for which Knuth has been the reference for three decades through volume three, Searching and Sorting.

Knuth is famous for his precision and attention to detail, going so far as to offer a financial reward for every error found in his books, although one suspects this doesn’t cost him too much since people are so proud that instead of cashing the check they have it framed for display. The other immediately striking characteristic of Knuth is how profoundly he is driven by esthetics. This applies to performing arts, as anyone who was in the Fraumünster this morning and found out who the organist was can testify, but even more to his scientific work. The very title “the Art of computer programming” betrays this. Algorithms and data structures for Knuth are never dull codes for computers, but objects of intense esthetic pleasure and friendly discussion. This concern with beauty led to a major turn in his career, which delayed the continuation of the book series by many years but resulted in a development that has affected anyone who publishes scientific text. As he received the page proofs of the second edition of one of the volumes in the late seventies he was so repelled by its physical appearance, resulting from newly introduced computer typesetting technology, that he decided to build a revolutionary font design and text processing system, all by himself, from the ground up. This resulted in a number of publications such as a long and fascinating paper in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society entitled “The Letter S”, but even more importantly in widely successful and practical software programs which he wrote himself, TeX and Metafont, which have today become standards for scientific publishing. Here too he has shown the way in quality and rigor, being one of the very few people in the world who promise their software to be free of bugs, and backs that promise by giving a small financial reward for any counter-example.

His numerous other contributions are far too diverse to allow even a partial mention here; they have ranged across wide areas of computer science and mathematics.

To tell the truth, we are a little embarrassed that by bringing Professor Knuth here we are delaying by a bit more the long awaited release of volume 4. But we overcome this embarrassment in time to express our pride for having Donald Erwin Knuth at ETH for this anniversary celebration.