Barbara Liskov (born November 7, 1939) is an American computer scientist and professor. She developed two programming languages, CLU and Argus. They are used in almost every modern programming language. She earned the Association for Computing Machinery's (ACM) Turing Award.
Barbara Liskov was born in Los Angeles, California. She got her BA in mathematics at UC Berkeley. After she graduated in 1961, she went to work at the Mitre Corporation. After a year, Liskov moved to Harvard and worked on computer translation of human languages. In 1968, she moved back to California and received her PhD in computer science at Stanford University.
Liskov went to work at the Mitre Corporation, in Bedford, Massachusetts. She worked on computer design and operating systems. During that time, she created the Venus Computer, which was specially created to support complex software. In 1971, she took a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she started her work with data abstraction. She thought of writing computer code like doing a math problem, not a technology problem. She wanted to use logic and have the language look beautiful. She developed two programming languages, CLU and Argus. They are used in almost every modern programming language. She later published Abstraction and Specification in Program Development (1986) and Program Development in Java: Abstraction, Specification, and Object-Oriented Design (2001). In 2008, Liskov won the A.M. Turing Award.