Thursday, April 1, 2021

Turing award winners - 2021

 Yesterday, I heard that Profs Aho and Ullman were awarded this years' Turing awards for their work in compiler design. I have never met Aho and Ullman, nor have I directly spoken with them. However, they were my heroes of my student life. I will explain how and why.

I joined my PhD in the year 1991 at IIT Bombay. I had completed by Bachelors in Electronics in 1987 and masters in 1989. This was an era when the Internet was not public craze yet and computers were mostly very basic - the PC XTs and ATs of the time based on Intel 286 and 386 chipsets! I had no professional training in computer science, yet computers fascinated me.

1991 was also the year when Linux was born. Probably outside of Linus' home, v 0.1 must have been installed in our lab in IIT Bombay! I had developed interests in software engineering aspects through use of Linux and working with many other server systems that we had recently procured in our lab. That, within months, led me to my interests in programming languages, how the compilers are built etc and I came across Aho and Ullman's red book, Principles of compiler design. I bought my personal copy then and it continues to be on my book shelf even today!

Concept of compilers fascinated me, given I had no formal training in CS.. So I started experimenting with concepts from Aho-Ullman book and started writing my experimental language parsers. I bought and read a book on the Backus-Naur Form of notations and started writing some toy programming language in the BNF notation and then starting to compile it with 'cc' on one of our Sun Solaris servers. I wrote my first language parser and compiler, autodidactically, by reading Aho-Ullman's 'red book'. Since then, of course, my interests have diversified and I haven't much worked in compilers for couple of decades now, but the mention of Aho and Ullman as rightful winners of Turing awards, took me back to the nostalgia that was 90s..

Congratulations Aho and Ullman on winning Turing award - richly deserved. And you will never know just how many lives you touched with your book and your work.