Turing Award Winner: Data Abstraction, Dijkstra, Distributed Systems | Barbara Liskov

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

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