Hi.
This is my post for Ada Lovelace Day.
Barbara Liskov (born Barbara Jane Huberman in 1939) is the creator of the Liskov Substitution Principle, **this is how I got to know about her work, **also
She was the first woman to get a PhD in computing in the United States (1968) [so close in time to the summer of love … makes you think about the history of the world…anyway]
Only recently Barbara won the prestigious Turing Award, an award known as “the Nobel prize in computing”. It was awarded for her work on the design of programing languages. Her research was very significant because it makes software easier to construct, modify and maintain, these ideas derived from from her experience building the VENUS operating system, a time sharing OS .
If you remember when S.O.L.I.D became a bit of a buzz word last year, then you know that the L is for the Liskov substitution principle, as described by Barbara Liskov:
` Let q(x) be a property provable about objects x of type T. Then q(y) should be true for objects y of type S where S is a subtype of T. `
then explored by Robert Martin ` Functions that use pointers or references to base classes must be able to use objects of derived classes without knowing it. ` This is a very important principle that gives you guidelines on how to avoid coupling (if you want to keep reading about it read the Martin article is quite a good read).
Honestly I don’t mind who is the source of knowledge, however there must be something wrong going on in the world since there aren’t all that many women in IT and even less in software development, I dont really know why but I certaintly hope it changes and maybe this little post will help just one little bit to show that women in IT can do wonderful things, as Barbara Liskov they can come up with the one of the most important principles of software development.
Get coding girl!
Some other links:
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/turing-liskov-0310.html/