Wikipedia

Ric Holt

Richard Craig Holt(February 13, 1941 – April 12, 2019) was an American-Canadiancomputer scientist.

Ric Holt
Born
Richard Craig Holt

(1941-02-13)February 13, 1941
Bartlesville, Oklahoma,US
DiedApril 12, 2019(2019-04-12)(aged 78)
Quadra Island,British Columbia,Canada
Academic background
Alma materCornell University
ThesisOn deadlock in computer systems(1971)
Doctoral advisorAlan Shaw
Academic work
DisciplineComputer Science
Sub-disciplineProgramming languages
InstitutionsUniversity of Toronto,University of Waterloo
Notable worksTuring (programming language)

Early life

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Holt was born in 1941, inBartlesville, Oklahoma,to Vashti Young and C.P. Holt, but later moved toToronto, Canada.As a teenager, he competed in track and field.[1]He graduated fromCornell Universityin 1964 inengineering physics.He spent a year in thePeace CorpsinNigeria,and then worked forIBM.He went back to Cornell and obtained aPhDincomputer sciencein 1970 under Alan Shaw.

Career

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Holt joined the faculty at theUniversity of Torontoin 1970. In 1997, he joined the faculty of theUniversity of Waterloo,where he remained until his retirement in 2014.

Holt's main research areas wereoperating systems,programming languagesandsoftware engineering,contributing many seminal results to each. His work includes foundational work ondeadlock,development of severalcompilersand compilation techniques. HisTuring programming languagewas used in universities and high schools in Canada and internationally. He also participated in the development of the Grok,[2]Euclid,SP/k,andS/SL programming languages. For many years, he ran a software company, Holt Software Associates (HSA), which created the Ready to Program environment still widely used in Canadian High Schools to teach programming.[3]

Holt served as president of Gravel Watch Ontario from 2003 until 2015.

In the fall of 2005, he was named #16 on Computing Canada's list of top 30information technologymovers and shakers in the country for the past 30 years.[4]In 2017, Holt was awarded the OS-CAN/INFO-CAN Lifetime Achievement Award.[5][6]

Death

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Holt died on April 12, 2019, on Quadra Island, British Columbia, Canada at the age of 78.[7]He hadParkinson's diseaseandLewy body dementiain his later years.[8]

Ric Holt Early Career Achievement Award

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In 2019 the Mining Software Repositories conference, the flagship conference in the area of repository mining that has been co-founded by Ric Holt, has established the Ric Holt Early Career Achievement Award. The first awardees are Emad Shihab (2019; Concordia University), Alberto Bacchelli (2020; University of Zurich) and Bogdan Vasilescu (2021; Carnegie Mellon University).

See also

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References

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  1. ^"Memories of Ric Holt: 1941–2019 | Cheriton School of Computer Science | University of Waterloo".Cs.uwaterloo.ca. 2019-04-22.Retrieved2019-04-27.
  2. ^"Introduction to Grok".GrokDoc.Waterloo, Ontario, Canada: University of Waterloo.RetrievedMay 23,2016.
  3. ^"CS-CAN Lifetime Achievement Awards 2017".CS-CAN.Retrieved2018-10-15.
  4. ^"Top 30 Canada's IT Movers and Shakers".Computing Canada.Vol. 31, no. 13. September 23, 2005. p. 3. Archived fromthe originalon March 7, 2006.
  5. ^"2017 Lifetime Achievement Awards • CS-CAN | INFO-CAN".Cscan-infocan.ca.Retrieved2019-04-27.
  6. ^"Don Cowan and Ric Holt receive Lifetime Achievement Award in Computer Science".University of Waterloo.Retrieved13 February2019.
  7. ^"Richard Craig Holt Obituary - Campbell River, BC".Dignitymemorial.Retrieved2019-04-27.
  8. ^"Memories of Ric Holt: 1941–2019 | Cheriton School of Computer Science | University of Waterloo".Cs.uwaterloo.ca. 2019-04-22.Retrieved2019-04-27.
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