I met the guy who invented the pointer ...

I am so lucky as a Professor to be in contact with some of the most amazing researchers from around the World. For example, a few years ago I met the person who edited many of the classic RFCs, and which now provide us with the foundation of our modern life.

You also meet people whose work you admire, and who have influenced you. Recently, we have started work with Sir Harry Burns, and whom we have looked too for much of our work in health and social care.

In 2000, I was just a Senior Lecturer, and my Professorship was a long way off. At the time we hosted an IEEE conference named ECBS (Electronic Computer-Based Systems). It was one of the coldest April weeks I think we have every had, but we all had such a fun and stimulating time, and the experience helped us to understand how to run international conferences.

At the time I was teaching C++ and Pascal, and I was quite a shock to be introduced by Harold "Bud" Lawson as "The person who invented the pointer":

Being introduced to the person who invented the pointer, was like meeting the person who invented the transistor, as I taught and wrote about software development.

Ref: “PL/I List Processing”, Communications of the ACM, Volume 10, Number 6, June 1967 [here].

Having taught C and C++, everything used to go well, until we got to pointers, and then it became a whole lot more difficult. It was such a fundamental concept, but some students really struggled with the way that C fused high-level programming with low-level concepts. The freedom that C gave us, with its usage of pointers, is still alive and kicking, and probably more relevant now than it was back then.

Recently Bud received the INCOSE 2016 Systems Engineering Pioneer Award in Edinburgh for:

"For a career dedicated to advancing the unification of systems and software engineering. He has been a major influence in the advancement of software engineering, systems engineering, the harmonization of the two, and the extension of systems engineering to broader areas of application."

It was people like Bud he turned Software Engineering into a proper scientific discipline. I am so lucky to meet inspirational people like Bud, and that he has received the recognition he deserves.

Although I do most of my development in Python, I'm still a C programming person at my core, and I love twiddling those bits:

The great thing about my current research areas (homomorphic encryption) is that the core of circuit logic, and where we rebuild functions such as add and multiply with electronic circuits. And for pointers ... the day I understood them, was the day that I really understood software (and hardware).