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Bjarne Stroustrup Awarded 2015 Dahl-Nygaard Prize
mikejuk writes Bjarne Stroustrup, the creator of C++, is the 2015 recipient of the Senior Dahl-Nygaard Prize, considered the most prestigious prize in object-oriented computer science. Established in 2005 it honors the pioneering work on object-orientation of Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, who designed Simula, the original object-oriented language and are remembered as "colorful characters." To be eligible for the senior prize an individual must have made a "significant long-term contribution to the field of Object-Orientation," and this year it goes to Bjarne Stoustrup for the design, implementation and evolution of the C++ programming language. You can't argue with that.
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'When I invented the term Object Oriented, C++ was not what I had in mind.' - Alan Kay.
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Contribution to Object Orientation? That's like an award for hammer-based carpentry.
As Stroustrup himself has explained several times, C++ is a multi-paradigm language. You can use it to do C-style system programming (indeed, using the exact same library and system calls without the overhead of a translation layer), object-oriented programming, or generic programming, and mix and match within the same app, library or even the same class definition. And there's no bytecode virtual machine overhead.
So to say that it's not a pure OO language, well no, it wasn't designed that way.
Who knew that there was an annual award for such a specialized field? It's surprising that Stroustrup hasn't gotten this award already. Based on the Wikipedia entry about this prize, it looks like in 2013 and 2014 they couldn't think of anyone else who created a popular object-oriented language. Maybe somebody should tell 'em about Guido Van Rossum and James Gosling. And what about the STL guy who was just interviewed here? Not to mention the Objective-C guy, whoever he is. (I'm sure I've left many other deserving candidates out - sorry about that.)
Why is inheritance a bad idea?
It couples polymorphism/dynamic dispatch to implementation sharing. These concepts can be used orthogonally through other means which gives much better flexibility. One example is what Go does with interfaces for one polymorphism/dynamic dispatch and composition for implementation sharing. You can do this style in C++ as well, and it often works out better than massive type hierarchies. Its much easier to re-factor (thus requires less upfront design) and avoids the problems of multiple inheritance. It can get you lower coupling too.
Well it's been many, many years since I've used it, which was back in the late 80s and early 90s. My impression from this time is that C++ is unquestionably a work of genius, but that I didn't particularly like it. Part of that is that we didn't really know how to use it effectively. In that era most object oriented programmers used concrete inheritance way too much. Part of that is due to aspects of what we thought an OO language should have that turned out to add complexity while being only marginally useful in practice (e.g. multiple concrete inheritance and operator overloading).
But in terms of meeting its design goals C++ is a tour de force of ingenuity -- even if some of those goals are questionable by today's standards. The very fact that we know some of those features aren't necessarily ideal is because they were taken out of the realm of academic noodling and put into a practical and highly successful language that could tackle the problems of the day on the hardware of the day. It's hard to overstate the practical impact of C++ on the advancement of both theory and practice of software development.
Any prize for contributions to OO programming pretty that didn't include Stroustrup in its first recipients would be dubious.
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What is true OO and how C++ prevents me from doing it? Show some code.
It's like a resume question from Evil Overlords, Inc. software division.
I thought Dahl-Nygaard was an Indian soup.
But a question for those who have: Does it still win with dynamic memory allocation? How granular is the dynamic memory allocation? Complete like C? or it is a bastardized version where the common block sizes could be defined at run time and then it runs without ever calling free()? I could imagine the language getting malloc() but not free() to retain speed.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Because its requirements, chosen by its designer, were misguided and impossible to achieve with a clean, elegant design.
Attempting to be compatible with C was a terrible mistake. The resulting language complexity, inconsistency, and limitations resulted in an unsafe language much harder to use than is justifiable.
What would have been wrong with just creating a compiler which was both a C compiler, and also a compiler for a clean OO language.
Programs could have had C functions in some source files/directories, (considered unsafe, of course), and clean OO modules in other files / directories. An easy way of using data in some C types such as basic numbers, arrays, and strings within the OO language could have been crafted, and a no-muss-no-fuss way of calling C functions from OO and vice versa could have been included.
What was lacking was the courage to drag programmers away from C rules and conventions enough to create a simple and powerful OO language.
The ugly compromise approach set back OO programming momentum, cost millions of person-years of unnecessary debugging effort and allowed many, many continued buffer overflow exploits etc. that ruin the reputation of software in general.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"I would try out the [C++] language [at AT&T] as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point, I said, no, no more. In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn't use it because it wouldn't stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language."
"[C++] certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it’s just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it’s personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it’s not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, "I wrote it; here, take it." It’s way too big, way too complex. And it’s obviously built by a committee. Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said "no" to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that."
Ken Thompson; cited in Seibel, Peter (2009). Coders At Work. p. 475.
Yes. And it is "see" "ploose" "ploose" for those in the know.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
What is true OO
No one knows. Those who think they know all disagree with one another.
Required reading for internet skeptics
When the only hammer you have is C++, every problem looks like a thumb.
C++ is to C as Lung Cancer is to Lung.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Re: "object-oriented computer science" -- Where is the "science"? Where are the theories, the metrics, and the independent repeats to verify?
Table-ized A.I.
Where are the "Functional Science" awards? You gotta have Paradigm Envy, no?
And how about the Procedural Awards, and the Goto Awards? I hear the Goto team racks up a lot of air-fare.
Table-ized A.I.