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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 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.