Robby Findler and Matthias Felleisen' ICFP'02 paper, "Contracts for Higher-Order Functions", was awarded the "ACM SIGPLAN Most Influential Paper Award." The citation reads:
Assertion-based contracts have proven very useful for dynamically enforcing first-order program invariants in procedural languages, but until 2002 they had not been supported in languages with higher-order functions. Findler and Felleisen's paper filled this gap, presenting "the first assertion-based contract checker for languages with higher-order functions."
The paper also spawned a great deal of follow-on work on such topics as the semantics of blame assignment and the integration of static typing and dynamic contract checking.
Higher-order contracts have become a central component of the Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) system -- one of the major software artifacts of the functional-programming community -- which serves as both a research testbed and an effective tool for programming-language education.
Presented annually to the author(s) of a paper presented at the ICFP held 10 years prior to the award year, the award includes a prize of $1,000 to be split among the authors of the winning paper. The papers are judged by their influence over the past decade.SIGPLAN is a Special Interest Group of ACM that focuses on Programming Languages
Robby's paper can be viewed at this link: "Contracts for Higher-Order Functions"
