The Racket programming language team, which includes University of Utah School of Computing professor Matthew Flatt (pictured, right), was presented the 2018 SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award.

The award is given by ACM SIGPLAN to an institution or individual(s) to recognize the development a software system that has had a significant impact on programming language research, implementations, and tools.

“It has been awarded to programming systems that are widely used and have changed the software development process, programming languages research and education,” said U School of Computing professor Mary Hall. “Matthew Flatt has been a principal member of the Racket team and one of the primary developers of Racket for over 20 years and very deserving of this recognition.”

The open-source Racket comprises of a programming language, an IDE, and an ecosystem of libraries and packages. Over 20 years, it has been used to deliver an innovative introductory course on programming and computing to millions of students at the high school and college level in the United States and around the world.

Other members of the Racket team –

Eli Barzilay (Google)

Matthias Felleisen (Northeastern)

Robert Bruce Findler (Northwestern)

Shriram Krishnamurthi (Brown)

Jay McCarthy (Massachusetts at Lowell)

Sam Tobin-Hochstadt (Indiana)