
Turing Award Winner: Data Abstraction, Dijkstra, Distributed Systems | Barbara Liskov
From The Peterman Pod by Ryan Peterman
April 27, 2026 · 35 min
About this episode
The episode features an interview with Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov discussing her contributions to programming languages and distributed systems.
Barbara Liskov is a Turing Award winner known for her work in programming languages and distributed systems. We discussed the major problems she solved in her career, stories about Dijkstra, getting rejected from Princeton because she was a woman and misc topics around her work. 🔸 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done 𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • YouTube: https://youtu.be/T9CGjbPZeaM • Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835 • Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/turing-award-winner-data-abstraction 𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀: • Go To Statement Considered Harmful: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf • Viewstamped Replication: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall09/cos518/papers/viewstamped.pdf 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀: 0:00 - Intro 1:00 - Getting rejected from Princeton 2:53 - The software crisis 9:03 - The drawbacks of Python 10:17 - Getting into distributed computing 13:09 - Paxos vs Viewstamped replication 21:44 - The significance of Dijkstras letter 25:04 - Why she stayed in academia 30:39 - Why her award was questioned…
People in this episode
Host: Ryan Peterman
Guest: Barbara Liskov
Topics covered
- programming languages
- distributed systems
- Turing Award
- academic challenges
- software crisis
Keywords
- Turing Award
- distributed systems
- programming languages
- Dijkstra
- software crisis
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Princeton, YouTube, Apple, Wikipedia
Books & works: Go To Statement Considered Harmful, Viewstamped Replication
More episodes of The Peterman Pod
- Co-Creator of Haskell: Functional Programming, Thinking in Types, Useless Languages | Simon Jones · June 8, 2026 · 1h 28m
- Turing Award Winner: P vs NP, Zero-Knowledge Proofs, Quantum Computation | Avi Wigderson · June 1, 2026 · 2h 16m
- Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling · May 25, 2026 · 2h 2m
- Creator of C++: Bell Labs, Negative Overhead Abstraction, Mistakes | Bjarne Stroustrup · May 18, 2026 · 1h 59m
- Harvard Professor: CS50, What Matters More Than CS, Lecturing Well | David J Malan · May 11, 2026 · 1h 4m
- PyTorch Eng Director: Promo Hacking, Industry Shifts, Regrets | John Myles White · May 4, 2026 · 44 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the The Peterman Pod podcast page.