Turing Award goes to Aho and Ullman
Contrary to the opinion of many HN posters, I actually believe the front-end (lexing, parsing, semantic analysis) is more important to most software engineers.Consider: You don't get to work on the back-end for most of the careers out there. But Lexing and parsing are very valuable if you want to parse something, say a configuration file. These kinds of things are more often seen in day-in-day work than code generation and optimization.