Getting Down to Basics

Writing the code to make a computer perform a particular job could be a Herculean task, back in the 1950s and 60s. "In the early 1950s, people did numerical computation by writing assembly language programs," says Alfred V. Aho, professor emeritus of computer science at Columbia University. "Assembly language is a language very close to the operations of a computer, and it's a deadly way to program. Of course, people can program at higher levels of abstraction, but that requires translating the higher-level language into a more basic set of instructions the machine can understand. Compilers that efficiently perform that translation exist nowadays in large part due to the work of Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. Their contribution to both the theory and practice of computer languages has earned them the 2020 ACM A.M. Turing Award. "Compilers are responsible for generating the software that the world uses today, these trillion ...