What are your favorite programming-related academic papers?

Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and Its Algebra of Programs<p>John Backus<p>IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose<p>Communications of the ACM, Volume 21, Number 8, August 1978<p><a href="http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs242/readings/backus.pdf</a>

Red-Black Trees in a Functional Setting<p>Chris Okasaki<p><a href="http://www.eecs.usma.edu/webs/people/okasaki/jfp99.ps" rel="nofollow">http://www.eecs.usma.edu/webs/people/okasaki/jfp99.ps</a><p>It shows how to construct Red-Black trees in an extremely simple manner in Haskell. I tried this technique in C++ and I was finished within an hour!

On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules<p>D.L. Parnas<p>Carnegie-Mellon University<p>Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15, No. 12, December 1972<p><a href="http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/parnas-criteria.html" rel="nofollow">http://sunnyday.mit.edu/16.355/parnas-criteria.html</a>

"Optimistic replication" (PDF), Yasushi Saito and Marc Shapiro, ACM Computing Surveys, Mar 2005.<p><a href="http://www.ysaito.com/survey.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.ysaito.com/survey.pdf</a><p>Fantastic paper, a really good overview of all things sync and replication - vector clocks, matrix clocks, you name it.

Systems Software Research is Irrelevant (aka utah2000 or utah2k)<p>By Rob Pike - August 05th 2000, 23:59 EST<p><a href="http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/" rel="nofollow">http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utah2000/</a>