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Turing Award Winner: Data Abstraction, Dijkstra, Distributed Systems | Barbara Liskov

April 27, 2026 · 35 min

Show notes

Barbara Liskov is a Turing Award winner known for her work in programming languages and distributed systems. We discussed the major problems she solved in her career, stories about Dijkstra, getting rejected from Princeton because she was a woman and misc topics around her work.


🔸 My keyboard Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ryanlpeterman/compose-simple-ergonomics-beautifully-done


𝗣𝗼𝗱𝗰𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:


• YouTube: https://youtu.be/T9CGjbPZeaM

• Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-peterman-pod/id1777363835

• Transcript: https://www.developing.dev/p/turing-award-winner-data-abstraction


𝗘𝗽𝗶𝘀𝗼𝗱𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀:


• Go To Statement Considered Harmful: https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/Dijkstra68.pdf

• Viewstamped Replication: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall09/cos518/papers/viewstamped.pdf


𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗺𝗽𝘀:


0:00 - Intro

1:00 - Getting rejected from Princeton

2:53 - The software crisis

9:03 - The drawbacks of Python

10:17 - Getting into distributed computing

13:09 - Paxos vs Viewstamped replication

21:44 - The significance of Dijkstras letter

25:04 - Why she stayed in academia

30:39 - Why her award was questioned

33:51 - Outro


𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗯𝗮𝗿𝗮:


• Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Liskov


𝗪𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗱 𝗥𝘆𝗮𝗻:


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• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanlpeterman/

• Threads: https://www.threads.com/@ryanlpeterman

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanlpeterman

• TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@ryanlpeterman

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