Resumen
The greatest joy Barbara Liskov has experienced in her distinguished career has not been the results of her influential work but the creative process itself. Creative activity is what makes research so interesting, she says, and "is not dissimilar" to what artists of all types experience during their work process. Among the contributions for which Liskov received the ACM A.M. Turing Award is using data abstraction to organize software systems. This new way of thinking resulted in a paradigm shift that had immense practical consequences; it made systems much easier to build and more likely to operate correctly. Reflecting on the progress of computer science in general during her career, Liskov says people were naive during the early years. Nevertheless, she acknowledges tremendous progress. In the 1970s advances were made in defining certain ways of doing things and, she says, that's what data abstraction is all about.