The Dr. Dobb's Journal Excellence in Programming Award is annually bestowed on individuals who, in the spirit of innovation and cooperation, have made significant contributions to the advancement of software development.
This year's recipient is an individual familiar to all serious programmers. For more than 20 years, P.J. Plauger has played an integral role in the definition, design, and implementation of the C and C++ programming languages.
Throughout the 1980s, Plauger was Secretary of X3J11, the ANSI-authorized committee responsible for the development of the original ANSI C Standard. This was followed in the early 1990s by a stint as Convener of ISO JTC1/SC22/WG14, the committee responsible for the development and maintenance of the ISO C Standard. For the past decade, he has been an active participant in the development of the C++ Standard. During all of this, Plauger earned his living as a member of the technical staff at Bell Labs, a vice president for Yourdon Inc., president of Whitesmiths Ltd., a vendor of an early commercial C compiler, and chief engineer at Intermetrics. Currently, Plauger is president of Dinkumware Ltd., a company he launched to license standard-conforming C and C++ libraries and online documentation. Further contributing to the growth of C/C++, Plauger served for more than 10 years as senior editor of The C/C++ Users Journal and contributing editor to Embedded Systems Programming, both DDJ sister publications. He is currently The C/C++ Users Journal's senior contributing editor.
In all of his spare time, Plauger managed to write or coauthor dozens of books and short stories, technical and otherwise. Along with Brian W. Kernighan, for instance, he wrote Elements of Programming Style and Software Tools in Pascal. Plauger also wrote The Standard C Library; Programming on Purpose, a set of books based on columns he wrote for Computer Language magazine; The Draft Standard C++ Library; Standard C: A Reference (cowritten with Jim Brodie); and The Standard Template Library (cowritten with Alexander Stepanov, Meng Lee, and David Musser); among others. Throughout all this, Plauger has been acknowledged as "a clear and stirring writer and a programmer's programmer."
Moreover, Plauger has been a published science-fiction writer for more than 30 years, with short stories appearing in publications ranging from Analog and Galaxy, to anthologies such as Analog Annual (edited by Ben Bova). In 1991, Plauger was a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.
Plauger earned a Bachelor's Degree in Physics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in nuclear physics from Michigan State University. At his request and in his name, Dr. Dobb's Journal is pleased to make a grant of $1000.00 to the Concord-Carlisle Regional School Committee in Plauger's hometown of Concord, Massachusetts. Please join us in honoring P.J. Plauger's contribution to the art and science of software development.
Past recipients of the Excellence in Programming Award include:
- Alexander Stepanov, for his work on the C++ Standard Template Library.
- Linus Torvalds, a name synonymous with Linux.
- Larry Wall, author of Perl.
- James Gosling, chief architect of Java.
- Ronald Rivest, educator, author, and cryptographer.
- Gary Kildall, for his work in operating systems, programming languages, and user interfaces.
- Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, John Vlissides, and Ralph Johnson, authors of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.
- Guido van Rossum, Python creator.
- Donald Becker, Linux networking contributor and chief investigator of the Beowulf Project.
- Jon Bentley, computer-science author and researcher.
- Anders Hejlsberg, developer of Turbo Pascal and architect of C# and the .NET Framework.
- Adele Goldberg and Dan Ingalls, pioneers in Smalltalk and object-oriented programming.
- Don Chamberlin, a database researcher and coauthor of SQL.
Jonathan is editor-in-chief of DDJ and can be contacted at [email protected].
