In 2012 Pierce became an ACM Fellow[2] for "contributions to the theory and practice of programming languages and their type systems". In 2015 Pierce and co-authors received the award for the most influential Principles of Programming Languages paper,[3] which was described as "instrumental in bringing the view-update problem to the attention of the programming languages community and demonstrating the broad relevance of the problem beyond databases. [...] More broadly, the paper sparked a great deal of follow-on work in the area of BX (“bidirectional transformations”), leading to a fruitful collaboration between the worlds of databases, programming languages, and software engineering."