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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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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.
It's amazing that this sort of thing was being done 40 years ago. So, what comes after OOP?
I'm out of my tree just now but please feel free to leave a banana.
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.
The problem is that straight after his lunar trip, you could tell that Armstrong was Astronaut of the year. In 1980, though, you might have thought Pascal was a good, recent, world-beating innovation (to pick a possibly bad, but nonetheless useful example). History shows that C won out, and was augmented from things in the OO field to give C++. So, in CS, things take time to prove themselves.
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.
PenguiNet: the (shareware) Windows SSH client
> Really, what is the use with giving the price to something which is already a standard ?
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.
Overall, neither language really deserved to "win". There were better languages available then, and there are better languages available now.
Apparently, Xerox PARC originally wanted to license Simula, but the Norwegian Research Council (http://www.forskningsradet.no/) demaned a little bit too much money for it, 1 Million $ or something, so PARC ended up making its own language (Smalltalk) instead.
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.
...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.
"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!
:)
Anyone who would get this joke doesn't need to worry about girlfriend issues at all, I'd imagine