Manfred Paul Award for Vadim Zaytsev

Dr. Vadim Zaytsev was granted the Manfred Paul Award for Excellence in Software Theory and Practice from IFIP TC2 “for his boldness in seeking real-world test cases for modern software language engineering tools by mining languages from the distant past”. The award is directly linked to his recently published paper Software Language Engineers’ Worst Nightmare (published at SLE 2020 and presented there at SPLASH) about a new language called BabyCobol, representing challenges that industrial compiler experts are facing when dealing with legacy software systems. The award bears the name of Manfred Paul, a German professor from Munich who, besides being a long time contributor to IFIP (decade-long chairman of TC2, founder of WG2.1 and WG2.2), was the author of one of the first European commercial compilers for ALGOL 60, and an active contributor to design and implementation of ALGOL 68.  This is the ninth time the award is granted since its foundation in 2001. The BabyCobol language will be used in a MSc-level Software Evolution course given at UTwente starting this month.