What are your favorite programming-related academic papers?

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs

John Backus

IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose

Communications of the ACM, Volume 21, Number 8, August 1978

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf

Red-Black Trees in a Functional Setting

Chris Okasaki

http://www.eecs.usma.edu/webs/people/okasaki/jfp99.ps

It shows how to construct Red-Black trees in an extremely simple manner in Haskell. I tried this technique in C++ and I was finished within an hour!

On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules

D.L. Parnas

Carnegie-Mellon University

Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15, No. 12, December 1972

http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/parnas-criteria.html

"Optimistic replication" (PDF), Yasushi Saito and Marc Shapiro, ACM Computing Surveys, Mar 2005.

http://www.ysaito.com/survey.pdf

Fantastic paper, a really good overview of all things sync and replication - vector clocks, matrix clocks, you name it.

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (aka utah2000 or utah2k)

By Rob Pike - August 05th 2000, 23:59 EST

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/