BY JON BENTLEY
IN THE REALM OF
INSIGHT AND CREATIVITY
The intellectual pleasures and financial rewards of solving one programming
problem, it turns out, are just the prelude to solving many more.
The first copy of Communications to arrive in my mailbox was the glorious July 1972 issue cel-
ebrating 25 years of the ACM in a 200-page overview of computing. I was a sophomore at Long
Beach City College, and it introduced me to the academic field of computing, as well as to three
luminaries for whom I would find myself working over the next decade: Donald Knuth, Joe
Traub, and Sandy Fraser. From my very first experience, the magazine was performing its crit-
ical role: communicating to members of the ACM the ideas that would challenge and change
their professional lives.
Ieagerly awaited the arrival of each subsequent
issue and still vividly recall many articles from
those years. Edsger Dijkstra encouraged me to
respect the difficulty of our craft in “The Humble
Programmer” (October 1972). David Lorge Parnas
taught me fundamental principles in “On the Criteria to Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules” (December 1972). And Dennis Ritchie and Ken
Thompson introduced me to “The Unix Time-Sharing System” (July 1974) that would soon be my
home. The list goes on: Donald Knuth on “
Computer Programming As an Art” (December 1974),
Brian Kernighan and Lorinda Cherry on “A System
for Typesetting Mathematics” (March 1975), and
Robert Floyd and Ronald Rivest on “Expected Time
Bounds for Selection” (March 1975). In those pages I
first met the ideas that would mold my professional
career and the people who would become my colleagues, mentors, and heroes.
I cannot describe the excitement I felt when my
own first article “Multidimensional Binary Search
Trees Used for Associative Searching” was published
in September 1975. It received second place in the
1975 Forsythe Student Paper Competition. Back
then, original research papers were viewed as within
the reach of undergraduate students (truth be told, I
tied with a high school student) and of interest to the
general ACM community. I wrote my paper (under
