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.

Comments

A suggestion

[f00zbll]

Perhaps /. can interview the winners and shed some light into the early development of OOL.

Xerox PARC

[peter303]

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.

OO Compliment: Aspect Oriented Programming

[theITCH]

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.

History of Computer Science

[Alien54]

There are likely many people whose vital achievements go unrecognized, and are under acknowledged by many younger programmers.

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

[Pig Hogger]

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.

Many navies have tallships to train cadet recruits in seamanship. Why wouldn't computer students have to write a program or two on punch cards and feed them to an old CDC pile of blinkenlights, and also toggle-in a bootstrap loader on a PDP-8 front-panel?

Re:A bit late ?

[Zeinfeld]

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 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.

Why we're not speaking SIMULA

[KjetilK]

I'm going to finish an MSc in cosmology at the University of Oslo, tomorrow, and I had my share of SIMULA. It's a very nice language in many aspects, very easy to learn, you get the OOP concepts in very good. Once you understand anything, you understand OOP.

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.