data abstraction

One of the themes of Barbara Liskov's Turing Award lectue ("CS History 101") was that nobody has invented a better programming concept than abstract data types.

William Cook wrote a paper for OOPSLA '09 that looks at how well PLT'ers understand their own vocabulary, in particular abstract data types and concepts that on the syntactical surface blend to all seem like ADTs.

The paper is On Understanding Data Abstractions, Revisited.

News flash: Barbara Liskov Wins Turing Award.

The full citation:

Barbara Liskov has led important developments in computing by creating and implementing programming languages, operating systems, and innovative systems designs that have advanced the state of the art of data abstraction, modularity, fault tolerance, persistence, and distributed computing systems.