By definition, the Turing Award is meant for long lasting contribution ; meaning the recipients get their prize a long time after their work has been done.
Which means that, "by construction", someone is working today on something that will be a worthy of a prize in the middle of the 2030s.
If not "what people", what topic do you think are candidates ?
topics: maybe some more awards for deep learning (Goodfellow?, DeepMind team for AlphaGo/Zero: Hassabis, David Silver, etc? If the current trend of transformers being hot continues, maybe some authors of "Attention is all you need"? Whoever makes the breakthrough that enables the singularity in the next decade?), a quantum computing cohort could win one year (Shor? Aaronson? idk anything about this field... Umesh Vazirani??).
edit: In an alternate universe where blockchain was used only for actually practical purposes instead of the current universe in which its invocation evokes images of cryptocurrency tiktokers, get rich quick schemers, and buzzword-spouters, in an alternate universe where the set of people interested in blockchain was very nearly the same set of people interested in, say, RSA encryption or zero-knowledge proofs, and if pseudonymous people could win (perhaps posthumously?? ok, this is a lot of conditionals...), satoshi would have to win one year, right? Maybe along with their precursors? Dunno if that usually happens with Turing awards.
I know HuggingFace has been a gamechanger providing API calls for big models, and providing very practically models like distilBERT, but still, Transformers don't seem practical to me.
Wolfram also is a no brainer.
Deep learning will get at least one more. Chris Lattner and the llvms perhaps? I don't know what work led to the M1 but it feels ground breaking.
I'd also like to see perhaps aaronsw and alexandra elbakyan win one.
I think my collaborators will win won for 2-D/3-D languages if this prediction comes true: https://longbets.org/793/ . Sounds arrogant and probably a mistake in my math but I'm betting on it.
This is defined by wiki as:
"The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions "of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field."
Its the Nobel price of computing, so I am not sure that a specific piece of software or its creators would warrant receiving this award. Rather, it's for theoretical contributions to the field, e.g. LeCun et Al., for deep learning.
But the creator of React might not get the Turing award anyways because they are not in academia.
However, I'd say it's quite unlikely. First, he had a supervisor Stephen Chong back in Harvard who co-authored the paper. It's unclear who should get the credit on that particular thesis. Second, the paper has unexciting citation count (200+). Lastly, he stopped publishing and is not in academia any more.