the guidance of Donald Knuth) explicitly for the
Competition; had it not existed, I would not have
written it. It remains to this day my most cited
research paper. (And because I’m sure that your
inquiring mind wants to know, I’ll point out that first
place went to a lad by the name of Guy Steele, who
I’m betting turned out okay. 1
Over the next few years, I published several technical papers in CACM. We submitted only papers we
felt were of broad interest to the computing community and that had a high ratio of ideas to pages. I
1He’s been a fellow of Sun Microsystems since 2003 and works on Sun’s Programming Language Research project.
