A Year of Programming.

The 1987 University of Texas Year of Programming was established early in 1986, in response to a proposal by Profs. Browne and Misra, with the following goals: 1) to advance the art and science of programming by bringing leading scientists together for discussions and collaboration; 2) to disseminate among leading practitioners the best of what has been learned about the theory and practice of programming; and 3) to provide critical research direction for the University Research Initiative in Formulation and Programming of Parallel and Distributed Computation. A small-scale workshop, involving about two dozen participants, met on the UT campus to bring together academic researchers and builders of real-time systems to enable researchers to assess their work's potential impact and to enable system builders to learn about current research to assess their work's potential impact and to enable system builders to learn about current research and to influence its direction to advance the design of real-time systems. The workshop disclosed that there is a serious lack of communication between researchers and practitioners, but that recent advances in specification methodology, temporal logic, and scheduling theory may provide a theoretical groundwork for real-time-system design.