Congratulations to Neil Jones with ACM Programming Languages Achievement Award 2014

[Andrei Klimov]

Dear Neil,

On behalf of the whole supercompilation community, we heartily congratulate you with receiving the prestigious ACM Programming Languages Achievement Award 2014.

You have contributed to various areas of computer science. You pulled forward the program manipulation field and had great influence on the research of our community by developing, together with your disciples, the Partial Evaluation method, evaluating all of the three Futamura projections, as well as further developing, improving, and better understanding other program transformation methods, including supercompilation. Your high quality publications serve for us as a lofty standard of how science should be done and results be presented. We are very glad that your scientific achievements are estimated at their true worth by ACM:

http://www.sigplan.org/Awards/Achievement/Main
Neil Jones is a pioneer of programming-language methods. He introduced control-flow analysis for higher-order programs, binding-time analysis to tame self-applicable partial evaluation, what is known today as "Jones optimality", and size-change termination analysis. Neil is also noted for bridges he established between programming languages and complexity/computability theory, e.g., characterizing Turing's Universal Machine as self interpretation, Kleene's S-m-n theorem as partial evaluation, Kleene's second recursion theorem as reflection, and the expressive power of typed cons-free functional languages by means of complexity classes. His pioneering work on complexity theory included the development of completeness for P and solving the spectrum problem (the basis of finite model theory). Lastly, Neil is a tireless and inspiring mentor, and he has written several influential textbooks that are testaments to his thesis that programs are data objects and that programming languages are a cornerstone of computer science.

It is also a pleasure to read the program of the Workshop in Honor of Neil D. Jones in DIKU, June 16th, 2014:
http://www.diku.dk/begivenhedsmappe/begivenheder-2014/neil-jones/
and to dream to be in DIKU on this day. We join the worm words said at the workshop.

Those who will participate at the META 2014 workshop in Pereslavl-Zalessky, Russia, will have an opportunity to honor Neil personally at the end of the first day, June 29:
http://meta2014.pereslavl.ru/program/program.html

Dear Neil, we are proud that we will see you soon after this happy event.

Sincerely yours,
Andrei Klimov on behalf of the participants of the META 2014 workshop