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Turing Award Goes to Pioneers of Object-Oriented Programming
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.
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Here is the article.... before its slashdotted....
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.
Cruise TT
P.O.O.P
Yep, the infamous slashdot DoS occurs again.
Anyway thanks for grabbing it before the envitable happened.
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
Perhaps /. can interview the winners and shed some light into the early development of OOL.
I have to agree that OO programming is in itself an important contribution to computer science. It is, as the article says, supporting more stable, robust code which can be reused (modularized).
:-)
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 ?
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
It's not every day that a group acronymed as POOP shows up on the Slashdot front page!
The next award goes to SUN for the development of the virtual machine for JAVA. Or maybe that's to close to the turing machine and therefore doesn't count as an outstanding achievement. Hell, it can't even solve the halting problem. Never mind.
The most interesting part of this whole award to these programmers is that it comes roughly 40 years after the accomplishments have taken place. Even in a world where it seems technology is evolving at a tremendous pace, it seems that the most basic and innovative aspects of certain technologies take a long time to take hold. Object oriented programming has been around a long time, but only recently has it become the mainstream method of choice. I wonder what current non-mainstream technologies will end up being considered revolutionary 40 years from TODAY.
Object Linking and Embedding
MS technology
is it a coincidence or deliberate, anyone know?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
In honor of them, here's some timely object oriented jokes (note: i did not come up with these)...
"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."
"Facts are meaningless. You could use facts to prove anything that's even remotely true." - Homer Simpson
I seem to remember that Marvin Minsky was doing OOD type stuff at MIT in the 1950's. He got his Turing award 32 years ago so maybe they are looking at newer stuff now.
As someone who has dabbled with OOP and can appreciate the scope of achievements it has facilitated, I am sure that this award is well deserved. What is a shame is that this award is relatively unknown (I had never heard of it until today) and I strongly believe that people who make such a fundamental contribution to society should have a greater profile awards wise. The Nobel prizes are a classic example of high profile 'achievement awards' which have been extended in the past (Economics in 1968) - maybe there should be a 'nobel prize' for computing science or, alternatively, the industry should work to promte an existing award (such as this) in the minds of the public.
fantastic joke. managers in panicing, techies laughing.
Acts@core.mailboks.com Acrux@core.mailboks.com Adam@core.mailboks.com Adar@core.mailboks.com Ada@core.mailboks.com
I heard them speak in Palo Alto about 20 years ago. Xerox PARC latched onto their ideas very early creating SmallTalk, Mesa, and ObjectivePascal. The last was the basis of much Macintosh software. Prof. Wirth in Switzerland created Pascal and evolved it into Modula. An east coast company combined C and SamllTalk into ObjectiveC, which became the basis of the NeXT user interface. ObjectiveC was more reliable and commercially suported than the buggy C++ coming out of Bell Labs at the same time. However, C++ was initially freeware which allowed it to evolve past its weakness and get adopted by large parts of academica.
Another interesting development in programming language features is Aspect or Multidimensional language support. The idea is that not all programming concerns are compositional or hiearchical in nature as Object Oriented Programming requires. Some Software concerns crosscut many objects. The traditional example is logging designs. The 'concern' logging 'crosscuts' the entire object base. Please take a look at AspectJ for information on a java Aspect Engine.
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.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Further jokes (including the ones above, I'm guessing this is where the poster got them) are here.
Smalltalk is a great language. It will even mow the lawn, wash the dishes and feed the kids. Unfortunately it will also wash the lawn, feed the dishes and mow the kids.
...and still no reward for me, the people-oriented programmer. What, I'm not cheerful and polite enough?
------
Today's Top Deals
~~~
Hey, yunno what? I really like gravity. I mean... I really like it. That Isaac Newton guy? He deserves a medal or something.
The streets shall flow with the blood of the Guberminky.
I don't really think much of the OO paradigm. It sure has its uses but, under most circumstances, it doesn't really buy you anything that you can't get from more traditional approaches.
I notice that, when confronting such views, OO afficionados often claim that what happens is that the paradigm is seldom, or never, correctly applied - much like old-fashioned revolutionaries, when apologizing about the failure of socialism.
Anyway, maybe I am negatively biased as far as the OO paradigm is concerned, in no small measure due to the fact that I was introduced to it via C++, probably the biggest piece of shit ever to come out of a discipline prone to produce much thereof.
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.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I had the pleasure of attending Dahl's last lecture-series, right before he retired (sort of) in 1998. I think he was 70 years old, totally eccentric and absent-minded, forgot to show up some days, but still the smartest brain in the room when it came to CS problems. My favourite living CS-person!
...or at least I have always considered it as such. Therefore, I was discouraged by Kristen Nyggard's poor lecturing technique (note that have only attended a single MIT guest lecture by him this past fall - he may have a signifcantly better approach under different circumstances).
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.
Its unfortunate that, the CS community can only come up with a 25k prize for our highest honor.
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.
...if the Turing Award went to an object-oriented language that wasn't Turing complete?
<cheap shot>I'm thinking visual basic here...</cheap shot>
What?! "This type of programming is so good it's in yur TeeVee!" <hick>
Seems like they deserve a better headline than that...
Guvegrra?
Sadly there will never be a nobel prize for computer science (or math which I would like to see). The "nobel prize in economics" is not a nobel prize but a prize that the Swedish Central Bank gives out in comemoration of Alfred Nobel.
Old Alfred would probably never have approved of this prize and his hiers have expressed great concern that this has become known as a nobel prize, which it isn't.
Anyway, for this reason alone we will never see another prize associated with nobel.
As OOP has its uses..
But where the hell are all you freakin' OO nuts getting off whining and screaming about how everything should be object oriented?
Are you that dense?
Christ. Just like the "Everything should be Microsoft!" and "Everything should be Linux!" zealots.
(I'd include "Everything should be Mac!", but when do you ever hear that? *snicker*)
I apologize if the links don't work. They may be tied to my amazon.com login in some way.
Move on. There's nothing to see here.
Why not try to convince them into adding a Nobel price? It has happened before. The Nobel price of economics was not originally one of Nobel's prices, they added it later (and a bad choice that was, IMHO). :-) Makes people think of it as something to do with mathemathics, which is appropriate.
Over here (in Norway) we call computer science informatics, perhaps you should do that too, for the PR effect
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
My father who teaches java in a high school told me this story about one of the inventors of Simula (I don't remember who though). His granddaughter asked him to help installing some sort of hardware on her home computer. However since these guys are pretty Unix-oriented and the system in question of course was Windows, his granddaaughter commented to her mother that "Grandpa doesn't really know very much about computers does he?"
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
...Carl Sassenrath say?
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I learned object oriented programming when I learned Simula. (It must have been in 1991. I had only programmed in pascal and basic before that.) It's a lovely language. A great language for learning the principles of programming in general and object oriented programming specifically. (Java is probably the next best thing, though.)
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.
Did they write an OO program that fooled judges into thinking they were conversing with real people on a terminal?
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?
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
all this cool buzzword jibber jabber the oo guys like to spout off about is damn irritating. for example, take one of the oo dorks favorite words- encapsulation. encapsulation of data is a waste of time and dangerous. encapsulation prevents code from getting access to data it's gonna get to anyways. this technique usually ends up forcing some kind of data indirection. data indirection is one more layer on the cake that's either gonna slow your code down more or create another place for an error to occur. why not just get directly to the data your gonna use?
oo sucklers also like the word inheritance. inheritance is for the programmer who cant think in more than two dimensions and needs a way to limit thought so they dont confuse the feeble mind that they have. an orange isnt just a piece of fruit. it's much more then that. treating it like it's just a piece of fruit only just complicates the matter when you want to use it for something else. computers dont think in two dimensions. they dont care about what class an orange belongs to. inheritance is a mind set humans use to limit how many things they have to think about at once. for the average programmer this works but for the great programmers it's nothing more than a hinderance.
oo programmers like indirection. makes em feel safe. dont be illuded. the extra layer of oo indirection doesnt really stop your precious encapsulated data from getting clobbered. dont have any false illusions about encapsulation. your buddies screwed up data pointer will walk all over your data and turn it into jibber jabber in about 3us.
the oo flag wavers start arguing about how easy you can re use the code. that's a bunch of b.s. show me one complex project where the code can easily be re-used on another complex project. it dont matter what oo you use or dont use. it's gonna be just as tough any way you do it.
one of the worst things about c++ are the templates. templates are a disaster wating to happen. if you need a sure fire way of creating a bunch of redundant code and a potential for creating problems that can take months to figure out, templates are your answer. if c++ is for average programmers to be able to all get along and play well together why would you want to give them a method that can create so much confusion?
for all those that got tought that static keyword in c was used for primative data encapsulation- you've been brainwashed. the static keyword has some very useful purposes that have nothing to do at all with data encapsulation. any embedded programmer will know exactly what im talking about.
i guess if your an average windows or linux programmer (if you can even call that being a programmer) the concepts of oo programming are a dream come true. for hardcore programming it really isnt that great. oo is nothing more then a way of limiting your brain.
im not saying go back to the old structured way of programming. i am saying that oo programming has a bunch of limitations and downfalls that should be recognized and jack asses that claim oo is the greatest thing since sliced bread need to wake up.
A critique of OOP from a business domain perspective:
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.
Table-ized A.I.
Give me a break. That post wasn't offtopic. Just because you don't find the "humor" to be very humorous, or because you don't agree with what it implies, does not mean it is offtopic.