历史版本1:Douglas McIlroy 返回词条

Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2007 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. Dr. McIlroy is best known for having originally developed the Unix pipeline implementation, software componentry and several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr.

His seminal work on software componentization makes him a pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product line engineering.

Dr. McIlroy earned his Bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University in 1954, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1959 for his thesis On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells. He joined Bell Laboratories in 1958, from 1965-1986 was head of its Computing Techniques Research Department (the birthplace of the Unix operating system), and thereafter was Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. He retired from Bell Labs in 1997, and currently serves as an Adjunct Professor in the Dartmouth College Computer Science Department.

He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and has won both the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("The Flame") and its Software Tools award. He has previously served the Association for Computing Machinery as national lecturer, Turing Award chairman, member of the publications planning committee, and associate editor for the Communications of the ACM, the Journal of the ACM, and ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems. He also served on the executive committee of CSNET.

Quotes

Those types are not "abstract"; they are as real as int and float.

As a programmer, it is your job to put yourself out of business. What you do today can be automated tomorrow.

Keep it simple, make it general, and make it intelligible.

The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code.

　　2008年5月14-16日，在德国迷人的小镇Garmisch，举办了软件工程四十年纪念会议，Peter Naur、Brian Randell、M. Douglas McIlroy、Albert Endres、Luigi Dadda等40年前软件工程会议的关键人物重聚旧地。

　　40年前的1968年，正是在此地举行的NATO（北约）科技委员会会议上，“软件工程”作为正式的术语被确定下来，标志着一个新学科的开始。 Peter Naur和Brian Randell主编的会议报告中这样写道：“我们特意选择‘软件工程’这个颇具争议性的词，是为了暗示这样一种意见：软件的生产有必要建立在某些理论基础和实践指导之上——在工程学的某些成效卓著的分支中，这些理论基础和实践指导早已成为了一种传统。”

　　软件工程这个学科还很年轻，Peter Naur和Brian Randell今天依然健在。作为著名的编程语言归约BNF范式中的N，Peter Naur因设计和定义了ALGOL 60而在2005年获得图灵奖。因IBM System360的工作于1999年获得图灵奖的Fred Brooks在《人月神话》的结尾比较了化学工程和软件工程。他认为：软件系统可能是人类所创造的最错综复杂的事物，软件工程还很年轻，需要继续探索和尝试。

　　这四十年的过程就是探索和尝试的过程，让我们来细细品味其中的科学精神之美。

Unix系统，是一个强大的多用户、多任务操作系统，支持多种处理器架构，最早由Ken Thompson、Dennis Ritchie和Douglas McIlroy于1969年在AT&T的贝尔实验室开发。经过长期的发展和完善，目前已成长为一种主流的操作系统技术和基于这种技术的产品大家族。

由于Unix系统具有技术成熟、可靠性高、网络和数据库功能强、伸缩性突出和开放性好等特色，可满足各行各业的实际需要，特别能满足企业重要业务的需要，已经成为主要的工作站平台和重要的企业操作平台。目前每年仍以两位数字以上的速度稳步增长。