Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award | Hacker News Reader

Leslie Lamport awarded Turing Award

acm.org

360 pointsrctay8961 comments

This paper is a classic: Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~cs230/reading/time.pdf

The above link is a summary to the paper. Here is the actual publication: http://cnlab.kaist.ac.kr/~ikjun/data/Course_work/CS642-Distr...

Clock, Byzantine general, Paxos, LaTeX, program proof. My CS curriculum often crossed Leslie Lamport's path.

Here is an interview he did a while ago which go trough his work : http://www.budiu.info/blog/2007/05/03/an-interview-with-lesl...

Mine as well. Reading his papers was always a pleasure as he has a knack for making the complicated accessible and interesting.

Quote from that interview:

>Q: The Byzantine Generals Problem paper (1982) describes the first provably correct algorithm for making several computers agree when some of them may give deliberate wrong answers. What are the its practical applications?

>A: The only practical applications I know of are in real-time process control — in particular, for systems that fly airplanes.

I guess Bitcoin didn't exist at the time..

"People fiercely resist any effort to make them change what they do. Given how bad they are at writing programs, one might naively expect programmers to be eager to try new approaches. But human psychology doesn’t work that way, and instead programmers will find any excuse to dismiss an approach that would require them to learn something new. On the other hand, they are quick to embrace the latest fad (extreme programming, templates, etc.) that requires only superficial changes and allows them to continue doing things basically the same as before. In this context, it is only fair to mention that people working in the area of verification are no less human than programmers, and they also are very reluctant to change what they do just because it isn’t working."

This is an excerpt from an answer about program verification. It's worth the read.

There is another good interview: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/d...

I like that the full news release (http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2014/turing-awar... ) comes as both HTML and a PDF built with --- wait for it! --- LaTeX.

If the HTML was built with LaTeX they should really rewrite that part.

It currently says "PDF file generated with LaTeX".

Edit: Misread what you wrote. I think only the PDF was made using LaTeX, not the HTML.

What took so long? And, come on, you have to at least mention Latex.

edit: they do, on a more full citation: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/lamport_1205376.cfm

What took so long, indeed. As long as I have been associated with the ACM on behalf of the practitioner, I have complained about this to anyone and everyone. Many thought he had already won (!) and a few believed that he didn't deserve to win because he is "merely a popularizer" (!!), and some (rightfully, probably) encouraged me to inject myself in the process if I felt so strongly about it. There was no way I was going to do that, so I had resigned myself to a lifetime of merely complaining about it. I was elated to discover this morning that my complaining has been cut short, and that Lamport has won the award that is long overdue to him!

It should be LaTeX, not Latex :)

I actually thought "what's he done /this/ time?" before reading the announcement. Then wondered the same thing.

It's quite ironic that most of the world knows him for LaTeX and not for the zillion fundamental contributions he has made to Distributed Systems.

Truly well deserved. #Respect

I'm embarrassed to include myself among the ignorant masses--I just assumed this was for his work on LaTeX. The distributed systems stuff sounds much more interesting though. Looks like I have some reading to do!

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

Yep. Time, Clocks, and the Ordering of Events in a Distributed System is cited in basically every distributed systems paper ever, and the ideas in it are behind, among other things, Amazon's Dynamo.

It's also fairly accessible. One of the first systems papers I read, and while I certainly felt in over my head, I got the high level ideas

8450 citations according to Google Scholar...that's pretty impressive. I think the CS average was <5 last time I checked :D

Will be interesting to see how many more the paper will have due to the award :)

Congrats and well deserved.

For me, the timing could not have been better; I'm to write and present a summary of that paper this week. It's an excellent paper, and while I am probably wrong, it feels like it defines the vocabulary for talking about time in computer systems. The very first episode of Star Trek: DS9 comes to mind; Captain Benjamin Sisco has met an alien species that does not exist in our system of linear time. Sisco cannot explain 'time' to the creature as he sees it as an innate part of communication. It is my belief that he would have a much better chance, had he read this paper.

Funny, it was only today that I learned about his contribution of LaTeX. I only knew about his distributed systems work.

Funny indeed! Even I had no clue about his contribution to LaTeX. I would imagine that his contribution to distributed systems far overshadows to that of LaTeX.

I first came across his name while researching hash trees, and this was related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamport_signature

As with Donald Knuth, it's hard to say whether his most high-impact contribution was to computing and algorithms or to typesetting; certainly the latter is even more widely used.

Well deserved for both.

"...certainly the latter is even more widely used"

There are lots of LaTeX users no doubt, but Lamport's work on the fundamentals of distributed systems informs the design all the large-scale systems relied on by billions of people.

Lamport's analysis of the limitations of time in distributed systems, and the Logical Clock construct to help with that is way more impactful than LaTeX.

There is something intriguing about these old timers' plain text html websites. One of these days I am going to have to drop WordPress.

My blog[0] is still plain HTML, but that's part of the reason I haven't made an update since late 2012(!).

Thinking about switching to a blogging platform myself. Or at least something that converts markdown to static HTML with git-commit hooks.

I guess what I'm trying to say is "Be careful what you wish for."

[0] http://grahammitchell.com/

Have a look at Pelican, one of the many solutions in this space. http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/

I know what you are talking about. More is always better than less. That's why I stick to WordPress.

While his work on distributed computing was certainly great, I find it curious that the press release doesn't even mention the achievement of Lamport that probably was important to lot more people: The creation of LaTeX. Sure, its not something typically honored by the Turing Award but leaving it out entirely? Come on!

Well, LaTeX is a (slight) improvement over TeX, which was written by D Knuth. I don't think that is what they would give a Turing Award to someone for.

Sure, but I saw the headline and though "Oh, the guy who wrote the LaTex book".

http://www.amazon.com/LaTeX-Document-Preparation-System-2nd/...

I imagine that is how he is best known. I didn't even know he did LaTex, just the book.

Perhaps in terms of quantity, but to many he is the man who single-handedly brought order to distributed systems. I was surprised he had not won a Turing award yet.

> achievement of Lamport that probably was important to lot more people

Not necessarily. We all use distributed systems that have been influenced by Lamport. It's just that we don't even think about it when we do it.

You think, if Noam Chomsky would receive the Turing award, they'll talk about his other achievements?

For an idea of the tremendous impact Leslie Lamport has had on computing to date check out this page:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...

About time too! This man is responsible for most of our progress in distributed systems. One of the few researchers Google hasn't poached from Microsoft yet.

Not sure why you seem to think researchers are flowing to Google. Microsoft Research is still the biggest name in distributed systems, if not CS in general. They have been consistently producing high-quality papers [1].

[1] http://jeffhuang.com/best_paper_awards.html

I do believe there is a flow of Systems researchers towards Google, at least from academia, if not Microsoft Research. I

Microsoft Research is active in many more areas of research than Google. However, I'm not sure that implies they are better than Google in the specific area of distributed systems research. FWIW, it seems every now and then Google publishes incredible papers that surprises folks in that community.

Aren't there like 4 other Turing award winners at MSR that also somehow escaped poaching (and are there any at Google)? I think you may have the wrong idea about where researchers would prefer to work...

Off the top of my head, there's at least one Turing Award winner at Google: Ken Thompson.

They have certainly successfully poached a bunch of awesome systems people from their positions in academia. I'm not sure how many from MS Research though.

Who are you thinking about who left MSR for Google?

Well deserved. His work on Paxos flavors worth it alone.

I have to admit that I had no clue this man invented latex. But we studied Lamport clocks and lots of his papers on distributed systems.

Congratulations to Dr Lamport.

Is there a list of Turing Award nominees published somewhere?

http://amturing.acm.org/byyear.cfm

Interestingly, Brian Kerninghan and Christos Papadimitriou have not received the award yet.

I'm wondering if they've been considered. Other names that come to mind:

Linus Torvalds

Richard Stallman

Guido van Rossum

Simon Peyton Jones

Andy Tanenbaum

John Resig

Tim Berners-Lee

Satoshi Nakamoto

How about Guy L. Steele? Surely he deserves it much more than most of these people, perhaps with the exception of tbl?

The only name on your list that is anywhere close to someday receiving the Turning Awards is Jones.

What contributions to computer science research has van Rossum, Stallman or Torvalds made? It's not an engineering award, it's a research award.

Is adding john resig to this list a joke?

This was very well deserved. Leslie has been one of my heroes ever since I came across his work while trying to write a functional lock manager for NFS. It was clear and very approachable.

I'm confused. Is he the Leslie Lamport I'm thinking of, the one who created LaTeX? If so, I'm very surprised to learn that he works for Microsoft.

Microsoft Research is one of the best CS research labs in the world.

A special mention must be made about the puns in the LaTeX book, like the letter sample written from Gnu York.

Wow I would have thought he won it in the 80s or 90s!

I think the follow to 'Hall of Fame' inductions style, recognize the contribution much later in the career or post-retirement.

Finally!

Your exclamation is probably not a reference to Gert Fylking [1], but it would be hilarious if it was.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gert_Fylking#Radio

(In June, 2013.)

The award for 2013 is being given in June 2014, it was only announced today -- http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2014/turing-awar...

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