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Comment by marshray | Hacker News Reader

Everybody knows Lamport, LaTex, and/or Paxos.

But I don't think I could name the organization that gives out these so-called 'Turing Awards' or any other recipients.

The Turing Award is a fairly significant award, as awards go. It's kind of like the Fields Medal or the Nobel. So it means enough to make Lamport getting it a big deal.

I'm not saying the Turing Award isn't a big deal.

I'm saying the Turing Award is less famous than LaTeX.

[EDIT] Downvoters: Just out of curiosity, are you more unhappy with me pointing out the incredible practical contributions that Lamport has made, or that I might be somehow questioning the relevance of the Association for Computing Machinery?

Since ACM is the major organization for computer science research, nearly everyone who has studied Paxos should know of the ACM. Lamport's own seminal papers introducing distributed clocks and Paxos were published in the journals Communications of the ACM and ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, respectively.

Yes, I know of the ACM. But why would I have expected a global scope 'Turing Award' to have anything to do with them?

Was Turing a member?

The official name of the award is the "ACM A.M. Turing Award" if that eases your fears about global namespace pollution. :)

And it really is the "Nobel Prize of computer science"; the fact that not all practitioners have heard of it is just another indication of the sad divide between researchers and practitioners in our field. :(

On the bright side, I (a practitioner) browsed the list of past awardees and recognized the name and work of nearly all of them. It seems quite common for Nobel laureates' work to have been in such a specialized subfield that few people had even heard of it.

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