Programming – Past and Future: William Gould Dow Distinguished Lecture

Abstract – The history of software development goes back more than 60 years, yet it remains challenging. Some people see better programming languages and better hardware design as the solution. Others emphasize software design, analysis, testing, and re-use. My own research has focused on tools. Much progress has been made. Does it tell us anything about the future?

Biography – Susan L. Graham is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research spans many aspects of programming language implementation, software tools, software development, environments, and high-performance computing. As a participant in the Berkeley Unix project, she and her students built the Berkeley Pascal system and the widely used program profiling tool gprof. Their paper on that tool was selected for the list of best papers from twenty years of the Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (1979-1999). She has done seminal research in compiler code generation and optimization. She and her students have built several interactive programming environments, yielding a variety of incremental analysis algorithms. Her current projects include the Titanium system for language and compiler support of explicitly parallel programs and the Harmonia framework for high-level interactive software development.

She received an A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was the founding editor-in-chief of the ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. In 2000 she received the ACM SIGPLAN Career Programming Language Achievement Award. She has served on numerous advisory committees; among them, the U.S. President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC). She served as the Chief Computer Scientist for the NSF-sponsored National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI) from 1997 to 2005. She recently co-chaired a National Research Council study on the Future of Supercomputing. She is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.