Eclipse awarded ACM System Software Award
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded Eclipse its prestigious System Software Award. The award is given to recognise "developing a software system that has had a lasting influence, reflected in contributions to concepts, in commercial acceptance, or both" and has, in the past, gone to the developers of Java, Unix, TeX, Apache, Smalltalk, RPC, the World Wide Web, and PostScript.
The award for Eclipse names many of the original Eclipse development team who are still at IBM – John Wiegand, Dave Thomson, Gregory Adams, Philippe Mulet, Julian Jones, John Duimovich, and Kevin Haaland – along with Steve Northover (now at Oracle) and Erich Gamma (now at Microsoft). Of these, only John Duimovich is still directly involved with Eclipse, but Eclipse Foundation Executive Director notes that "Eclipse remains successful, vibrant and innovative. It is truly an industry-wide platform that is relied upon in diverse areas such as enterprise development, embedded software development, mobile and modeling".
The ACM made the award because it says "Eclipse changed the way builders think about tools by defining a set of user interaction paradigms for which domain-specific variants are plugged in and customised for their tool" by creating an IDE platform designed for developers to "seamlessly integrate their own extensions, specialisations, and personalisations".
Other ACM awards announced were:
- Grace Murray Hopper Award
Luis von Ahn
"for advances in harnessing the human side of computation to solve problems that neither humans nor computers could solve alone" - Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award
Hana Samet
"for pioneering research on quadtrees and other multidimensional spatial data structures". - Karl V. Karlstom Outstanding Educator Award
Hal Ableson
"innovative advances in curricula designed for students pursuing different kinds of computing expertise". - ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award
Stephanie Forrest
"for contributing new ways to address problems in computer science and biological sciences".
(djwm)