Name:Mary Shaw

Bio:

Mary Shaw once designed traditional general-purpose programming languages, even languages with support for formal specification and verification, but realized that the real action is in the high-level organization of systems and turned to architecture description languages, whereupon the High Church of Programming Languages read her out as a heretic. In this journey to apostasy she

• accepted aliasing as dangerous but not evil, in the late 1970’s
• renounced belief in the assignment axiom, in the late 1970’s
• realized that types were added to programming languages to document broad intent and provide early warning of problems in execution, in the early 1980’s
• never accepted objects as the one and true path
• disavowed complete formally verified specifications of correctness, in the mid 1980’s
• embraced little languages for lightweight programming, in the late 1980’s
• decided that the right abstractions are more important than formal elegance and so espoused first-class architectural connectors, in the early 1990’s
• acknowledged that cost-effectiveness in context has higher priority than pure correctness, in the mid 1990’s
• recognized that most code doesn’t matter enough to need rigorous validation, around the turn of the century
• anticipates more heresies yet to come

Affiliation:Carnegie Mellon University