Turing Award Goes to Pioneers of Object-Oriented Programming 91
Jens_AAMC wrote in to point out that the 2001 Turing Award has been announced, going to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard for their work in object-oriented programming.
"Just think, with VLSI we can have 100 ENIACS on a chip!" -- Alan Perlis
Looks like its half way to a slashdotting already (Score:5, Informative)
COMPUTING'S HIGHEST HONOR AWARDED TO INVENTORS OF DOMINANT PROGRAMMING STYLE
Norwegian Team Developed Concepts for Software Now in Home Entertainment Devices
New York, February 5, 2002...The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has presented the 2001 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of Norway for their role in the invention of object-oriented programming, the most widely used programming model today. Their work has led to a fundamental change in how software systems are designed and programmed, resulting in reusable, reliable, scalable applications that have streamlined the process of writing software code and facilitated software programming. Current object-oriented programming languages include C++ and Java, both widely used in programming a wide range of applications from large-scale distributed systems to small, personal applications, including personal computers, home entertainment devices, and standalone arcade applications. The A.M.Turing Award carries a $25,000 prize.
The discrete event simulation language (Simula I) and general programming language (Simula 67) developed by Dahl and Nygaard at the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo, Norway in the 1960's, led the way for software programmers to build software systems in layers of abstraction. With this approach, each layer of a system relies on a platform implemented by the lower layers. Their approach has resulted in programming that is both accessible and available to the entire research community.
"The work of Drs. Dahl and Nygaard has been instrumental in developing a remarkably responsive programming model that is both flexible and agile when it is applied to complex software design and implementation," said John R. White, executive director and CEO of ACM. "It is the dominant style for implementing programs with large numbers of interacting components." The awards committee noted that the core concepts embodied in their object-oriented methods were designed for both system description and programming and provided not just a logical but a notational basis for their ideas. The benefits of their work are not limited to software but are applicable to business processes as well.
Drs. Dahl and Nygaard are professors (emeriti) of informatics at the University of Oslo. They developed their object-oriented programming concepts at the Norwegian Computing Center from 1961-67. Professor Nygaard was involved in large-scale simulation studies at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment from 1949-60. He continued his work on object-orientation, and did research on systems development, participative system design, and societal consequences of information technology. With Danish colleagues, he invented Beta, a general object-oriented language.
Professor Dahl also worked at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, and joined the Simula project as an experienced designer and implementer of basic software as well as high level programming language. In 1968, Dahl became the first professor of informatics at the University of Oslo, responsible for establishing research and education programs in this rapidly expanding field. His focus on computer program verification led to the development of his theory of constructive types and subtypes based on computer-aided concept formation and reasoning.
ACM will present the A.M. Turing Award, its most prestigious technical honor, at the annual ACM Awards Banquet April 27, 2002, at the University of Toronto. The award was named for A. M. Turing, a pioneer in the computing field. Financial support for the award is provided by InterTrust Technologies Corp.'s Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory.
About ACM
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a major force in advancing the skills of information technology professionals and students. ACM serves its global membership by delivering cutting edge technical information and transferring ideas from theory to practice. ACM hosts the computing industry's leading Portal to Computing Literature. With its world-class journals and magazines, dynamic special interest groups, numerous conferences, workshops and electronic forums, ACM is a primary resource to the information technology field. For additional information about ACM and the ACM Portal, see www.acm.org.
Re:Looks like its half way to a slashdotting alrea (Score:1)
Anyway thanks for grabbing it before the envitable happened.
OO Compliment: Aspect Oriented Programming (Score:2, Interesting)
PostgreSQL Object Oriented Programming? (Score:1, Redundant)
P.O.O.P
A suggestion (Score:3, Interesting)
A bit late ? (Score:2, Troll)
What i DO find interesting though... is that they (ACM) gives the price to such an old theory. I would instead prefer if ACM would have selected some _new_ issue, that could be highlighted and given a few moments in the spotlight.
Really, what is the use with giving the price to something which is already a standard ?
I dont say they dont deserve the price, OO is great. What I do say is that the price itself could do much more good if it were given to some theory which has yet to make great impact if given the time and resources to do so. It feels like giving the "Astronaut of the year Award" to Neil Armstrong for his lunartrip
Cant ACM, with all its resources and people, try to be a bit more innovative ?
Re:A bit late ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A bit late ? (Score:1, Redundant)
Re:A bit late ? (Score:1)
Re:A bit late ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Granted, you could pick XML as a more recent thing that's going to have long-term improving effects. But it's not really a huge innovation, and it may turn out in 5 years that it's not as relevant as everyone thinks it's going to be.
I guess the conclusion would be that buzz-words make for bad awards.
Re:A bit late ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think anyone should get a Turing for XML, the inventive step took place in SGML about 15 years earlier. XML is simply a cleanup of SGML that removes incompetence, idiocy and illogic from the SGML design. The basic principle is the same though. SGML was too badly executed to give Goldfarb any awards.
Rather than give Dahl and co an award I would much rather people looked at their ideas and acted on them. People slap each other on the back over their use of 'object oriented' languages, but Java and C# both offer only a small part of the power of the OOP model and C++ offers the wrong parts.
The modern OOP languages offer only the data structuring concepts, Simula also had a message passing concept which has largely been lost. It took me ages to work out that the reason the message passing explanation in the C++ book was so hard to follow is that it is actually irrelevant to C++.
A true fine grained parallelism model with message passing would be very useful at this point in time when a lot of programming projects involve networks and GUIs. The pthreads model is too low level. It is a pity that the developers did not take note of the fact that a year after inventing monitors, Hoare invented CSP which is a more powerful model.
To give concrete examples of the benefit of deep grained parallelism and message passing consider how often Windows halts waiting for input in some dialog box in a different window or how often an X-Window will be left unrefreshed during processing. The reason is that doing the job properly requires multithreading and the pthread model is to cumbersome for most developers to deal with.
Re:A bit late ? (Score:1)
Sure - like I said, it wasn't that innovative. I was just pulling examples out of the air to give an idea why it's better to award concepts that have proven themselves winners over time, rather than those that seem like a good idea now.
Re:A bit late ? (Score:1)
I think that deserves an award in itself.
Re:A bit late ? (Score:1)
What's the CSP? Please?
Re:A bit late ? (Score:2)
Communicating Sequential Processes. It is an algebra for describing parallel processes that communicate with each other. The key feature of CSP is that when the processes communicate they rendezvous, that is if A is trying to talk to B and B is not ready then A will wait until B is ready, contrawise B will wait if A is not ready.
The main application of CSP in program language design was the inmos Occam programming language.
The advantage of CSP is that it is much easier to write parallel programs because communication between processes is handled in the same way as communication between processors. The type of structures that have to be kludged up out of semaphores and shared memory in UNIX/C or Windows/C can be provided as native language features.
What CSP ammounts to is a start on developing the equivalent of structured programming constructs for network computing applications. In practice you need to add a few extra structures such as FSM support and structures to handle termination and fault handling is a decent fashion.
Re:A bit late ? (Score:1)
Re:A bit late ? (Score:1)
But in general, you're very much right on the money (except perhaps by implicitly assuming that XML is clean since it's cleaned-up SGML; XML is cleaner, but still underspecified and mostly abused).
Re:A bit late ? (Score:4, Insightful)
So the prize committee don't have to make a "political" judgement. Even 10 years ago, OO languages were still "up-and-coming", and it wasn't clear that they would strongly influence the field. Since that time, C++ has been standardized; in MFC and OpenStep, the two most widely used desktop operating systems have an OO API; Java has been introduced and became widely popular; structured systems analysis techniques have been extended to objects by Rummelhart and Booch; and OO databases have been popularized.
Why is making a risky decision a bad thing to do? The problem is if the prize committee "guesses" wrong. They pick a winner who develops a technology that ultimately isn't of much use. This degrades the stature of the award. This might be one of the reasons the Nobel prize is also quite conservative, as another poster mentions.
Re:A bit late ? (Score:2)
But seeing as they didn't, it's a fine choice for today. Simula's introduction of classes was a very significant contribution to language design and they deserve to be rewarded for it now.
While they're still alive.
This is about 35 years after they developed Simula, and when I saw Ole Dahl speak back in 1980 he wasn't exactly a kid by any means.
No kid indeed (Score:1)
Mark you calendars! (Score:4, Funny)
Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting (Score:1)
Re:Ole - that's interesting (Score:1)
I ask if there is any conenction with the name of Ole the OOP component framework from MS and TWO people mark me as offtopic!
crack
Object Oriented... (Score:5, Funny)
"How many Object Oriented programmers does it take to change a lightbulb?"
"None, they send it a message, and it changes itself."
"How many C++ programmers does it take to change a light bulb?"
"You're still thinking procedurally! A properly designed light bulb object would inherit a change method from a generic light bulb class!"
"The nice thing about C++ is that only your friends can handle your private parts."
"OK, I admit it: My girlfriend's just an object to me. Unfortunately, there is some information hiding, but thankfully, she's fairly encapsulated, nicely modular, and has a very well defined interface!
"Have you heard about the object-oriented way to become wealthy?"
"No..."
"Inheritance."
More jokes (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Object Oriented... (Score:1, Funny)
#define private public
Yes I know it's a joke, but....
Here's one I remember from Compuserve (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Object Oriented... (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone who would get this joke doesn't need to worry about girlfriend issues at all, I'd imagine
Was it a new idea or had computers caught up? (Score:1)
Awards such as this should have a higher profile (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Awards such as this should have a higher profil (Score:1)
Over here (in Norway) we call computer science informatics, perhaps you should do that too, for the PR effect
funny story... (Score:4, Funny)
fantastic joke. managers in panicing, techies laughing.
Xerox PARC (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Xerox PARC (Score:2, Insightful)
Overall, neither language really deserved to "win". There were better languages available then, and there are better languages available now.
Re:Xerox PARC (Score:2, Insightful)
Right there, the Norwegian government blew away the chances of making Simula a world-dominating language. A pity for Dahl, Nygaard and the prestige of their university, but maybe not a great loss for humanity. Having programmed in Simula, I have to say it's still a feature-poor, slow-performing (but interesting) language.
History of Computer Science (Score:4, Interesting)
There probably should be something, a couple of semesters in the history of Computer Science, just so that folks can really know and appreciate the technical barriers that had to be overcome.
Given that many of these guys are still alive, it would be good to have accurate information, instead of geeks depending on various hollywood movies for their education.
Re:History of Computer Science (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:History of Computer Science (Score:1)
Well, the navy is a bit different than the computer science field. Navies are filled with tradition, which is an important part of how the navy functions. It wouldn't be worth it for a school to maintain the ancient historial computer equipment just so that students can know what it was like back in the day. Not to mention that the time spent learning to program on punch cards can be used to learn a modern language that they can use in real life.
I am deffinitly for a history of computing requirement. I would have loved to have heard more about the history of the field, even if I will never have the opportunity to work with most of the old school machines.
Re:History of Computer Science (Score:1, Offtopic)
on the other hand, MS will never release the code to Win 1.0 to the public domain. (even though you can still see what it looked like [209.196.53.130]) or read the original article in Byte [209.196.53.130] that announced it.
I like this line describing Windows: "Microsoft Windows is an installable device driver under MS-DOS 2.0 using ordinary MS-DOS files." Look how far they have come [smile]
Re:History of Computer Science (Score:2)
You could either install to floppy or hard disk. It used a tiled window interface (instead of overlapping windows).
Martin Davis Book (Score:1)
I apologize if the links don't work. They may be tied to my amazon.com login in some way.
Sigh (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:OOD? No, thanks. (Score:1)
Whenever you use an OO Language (and your right again, you could argue wheater C++ is an OO language) without applying sane OO design principles you are doing something wrong. Just using an OO capable language doesn't make your code OO, and a badly designed OO system tends to confuse even more than a badly designed traditional one.
But try to imagine stuff like CORBA in an massivly distributet environment, an heterogenous choice of languages with an horde of developers without the OO partadigma....
Re:OOD? No, thanks. (Score:1)
I've written code in many computer languages including C, assembler, Cobol, Fortran, C++, Pascal, Basic (Visual and otherwise), Lisp, Java, Smalltalk etc etc etc. It's possible to write good code - or bad code - in any of them. It's also possible to use object oriented concepts in any language. In my experience, the best code always has some level of object orientedness about it - even if it's just encapsulation.
I will admit, that even though C++ is my favourite language, the worst code I have ever seen was in C++.
Why we're not speaking SIMULA (Score:5, Interesting)
ESR gave a lecture here a couple of years ago, and after the lecture he got the text-book in SIMULA we've used in beginner's courses. Along with that, the story why we're not all speaking SIMULA was cited:
Donald Knuth visited the University of Oslo during a sabbatical in 1970, and after working with SIMULA, he liked it so much he wanted to bring it home with him. Nygaard et al said yes of course, but unfortunately, it wasn't theirs to give, as it was the Norwegian Research Council for Science and Humanities that owned the copyrights. And they said, "no, but you may purchase a license". Knuth said, of course "oh, too bad".
If this story is inaccurate, I trust somebody will correct it... :-)
A lesson to be learned is that if you protect your IP too vigorously, you are more likely to loose it all than gain anything.
SIMULA was replaced by Java here in 1996 (I think) in the beginner's course. That's after I took it. That was the final stronghold... :-)
BTW, I posted:
2002-02-05 15:30:44 A. M. Turing Awards For OOP (articles,news) (rejected)
But at the time of the submission, it wasn't posted anything on ACM's site, so I kind of understand it.
...oo is a very communication-oriented concept... (Score:2, Insightful)
The lecture was _terrible_ - here's why:
His lecture was promoted as being an overview of new methods of teaching object-oriented programming methodology in ways that are complementary _and_ dissimilar to procedural programming, using an idea of basing examples on "models of sufficiently complex systems". His primary example (addressed in the lecture) was a restaurant -system in which customers, waiters, seating, and interactions would all be modelled in an OO language. Great, you say, that sounds very interesting - and it is, if you are interested in pedagogy and CS (i.e. how people can effectively teach and learn CS concepts).
Unfortunately, the 100-minute lecture was primarily made up of a history of Simula and other OO languages which Nyggard had worked on, which did little/nothing to illuminate his main points. A 10-minute overview would have provided just the right amount of background, but 60+ minutes of quasi-superficial information about Simula and its descendant languages is exactly the kind of thing that _shouldn't_ be conveyed in lecture format. That's the kind of information which should be read, or be sprinkled amongst practical information in lectures teaching the language.
Even worse were the illustrations for his "restaurant-system" example; while competently rendered (apparently by an illustrator friend of his), the images were crowded with idiomatic in-jokes which detracted from understanding the interactions which were the focus of the excercise. (especially confusing were the jokes requiring familiarity with european/scandinvian culture - he seemed disappointed that we were not laughing.)
All I wanted from this lecture was specific details of a new OO pedagogical method, and hopefully some case study examples. There might have been some of this at the end, but I was dozing in and out during the last 20 minutes, and while I was awake I noticed none of this.
I'll make the obvious trolling comment here about computer scientists/programmers being too focused on their work to bother figuring out how to speak with other people/communicate their ideas effectively.
Note to pioneers: the best-promoted ideas, not necessarily the most advanced or interesting, get the most mental currency - look to C, look to PERL. If you can only evangelize as effectively as Nyggard (don't get me wrong, SIMULA/et al. are _very cool_ - just poorly promoted) I am much less surprised at the failure of OO to become the "default" programming approach.
Sheesh.
Piddly CS Nobel Prize Award (Score:1)
Two individuals fundamentally alter code development and freely offer up there services to whatever individuals desire it.
I think it would be be a worthwhile cause to bump this prize up considerable with the net effect of having more smart people be rewarded for giving their research away to the community at large.
What's with the headline? (Score:1)
What?! "This type of programming is so good it's in yur TeeVee!" <hick>
Seems like they deserve a better headline than that...
Re:No offense.. (Score:1)
Should get the IT-Hype Award (Score:1)
http://geocities.com/tablizer/oopbad.htm
OOP has its place, but in general it is over-hyped.
SUMMARY OF OO FLAWS:
1. The real world does not change in a hierarchical way for the most part. You can force a hierarchical classification onto many things, but you cannot force change requests to fit your hierarchy.
2. There are multiple orthogonal aspect grouping candidates and the ones favored by OOP are probably not the best in many or most cases. OO literature is famous for only showing changes that benefit the aspects favored by OO. In the real world, changes come in many aspects, not just those favored or emphasized by OO. Encapsulating by just a single dimension is often a can of worms.
3. OOP's granularity of grouping and separation is often larger than actual changes and variations. OOP's alleged solutions to this, such as micro-methods and micro-classes, create code management headaches and other problems.
4. OOP has the habit of hard-wiring the model structure and relationships into the larger program code structure, as opposed to using more change-friendly and multi-view-friendly formulas or expressions (such as relational and Boolean). I lean toward virtual, as-needed structures rather than global ones.
5. There is no decent, objective, and open evidence that OOP is better. It may just all be subjective or domain-specific. Software engineering is sorely lacking good metrics.
6. Many of the past sins that OOP is trying to fix are people and management issues (incentives, training, etc.), and not the fault of the paradigms involved. Until true A.I. comes along, no paradigm will force good code. If anything, OOP simply offers more ways to screw up.
A story about these guys (Score:1)
What would... (Score:1, Troll)
Gotta love Simula... (Score:1)
I never really liked the book - "Object Oriented Programming With Simula" by Kirkerud - we used to learn Simula though. Too disorganized and lacked an alphabetic reference of all the imperatives in the language.
And it's been difficult to find good simula compilers lately. Even in the good old days of sun3, the sc compiler didn't support 8 bit (binary) files properly, and I had to turn to pascal and c.
And while I respect the scientific effort Kristen Nygaard has made, I can't stand his political views. He's a leading opponent of the European Union in Norway.
How did they win the Turing Award? (Score:1)
JUDGES: We are going to award you with this year's Turing Award.
D&N: Why are you going to award you with this year's Turing Award?