Top prize in computing goes to MIT professor

Barbara Liskov won this year's Turing Award for her work on programming languages. (Donna Coveney/ MIT)

Barbara Liskov, a veteran Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who created building blocks for software programming languages that were key to personal computers and the Internet, today will be named the winner of the 2008 A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious prize in computer science.

The award, known in technology circles as the Nobel Prize of computing, is named for legendary British mathematician Alan Turing, who helped the Allies break German naval codes during World War II. It will be presented to Liskov by the Association for Computing Machinery, a scientific society, at a conference in San Diego in June.

Liskov, 69, an institute professor and associate provost at MIT, is being honored for her innovations in "building the pervasive computer system designs that power daily life," the associ ation said in a statement set to be released today. "Her achievements in programming language design have made software more reliable and easier to maintain."

In particular, Liskov developed two programming languages, CLU in the 1970s and Argus in the 1980s, that formed the underpinnings for languages like Java and C++, commonly used to write software applications for personal computers and the Internet. As such, her work helped to form society's information infrastructure.

Liskov, a California native who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and earned a doctorate from Stanford University, worked at defense contractor Mitre Corp. in Bedford before joining the MIT faculty. In an interview, she said she was taken by surprise when she was told by the association that she won the Turing Award.

"It's a great honor; it's very exciting," Liskov said. "It recognizes my contributions and their importance to the field."

Colleagues said Liskov's contributions are widely known in the computing field but not by the general public. "She changed the way people think about how to organize programs," said John V. Guttag, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who nominated Liskov for the award. "Every modern programming language has ideas in it that can be traced back to Barbara. And every modern design method in programs owes a lot to her innovations."

In the early days of computing, programs were written as long strings of numbers and characters known as code, sometimes broken up by chunks. Liskov's work helped pioneer what is known as object-oriented programming, now the most common approach to software development. She is credited for laying the groundwork for development of sophisticated programs tailored to financial, medical, and other consumer and business applications.

Those innovations have since been widely embraced by code writers throughout the field. "People may not know where it came from, but the way programs are built today is based on these concepts," Liskov said yesterday.

The Turing Award carries a $250,000 prize, underwritten by microprocessor producer Intel Corp. and search engine Google Inc.

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.