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.

Comments

Poor Alan Kay

[TheRaven64]

'When I invented the term Object Oriented, C++ was not what I had in mind.' - Alan Kay.

Re:Poor Alan Kay

[Calavar]

C++ is a three-way compromise between good object oriented design, backwards compatibility with C, and high performance. Stroustrup has never billed it as anything else.

Of course, the fact that C++ is a compromise between three goals that are often at odds means that it isn't anywhere near the best language for object-oriented design (loses to Smalltalk and many others), for backwards compatibility with C (IMO Vala does better -- YMMV), or for high performance (loses to FORTRAN). But it does a reasonable job of "good enough" on all three fronts, and that is what has made it so enduringly popular over the last few decades.

So, no, C++ isn't the best language for object-oriented programing. It's not even close. But that doesn't mean it is a bad language.

Re:Poor Alan Kay

[Cassini2]

C++. All of programming in one language - except simplicity.

"When programming in C++, you have to pick the subset of the language that you want to use. Otherwise your code will be unreadable."

Contribution?

[Anonymous Coward]

Contribution to Object Orientation? That's like an award for hammer-based carpentry.

Re:Contribution?

[ranton]

I also find it hard to believe an award for pioneering work in object-orientation which started in 2005 just got around to awarding Bjarne Stoustrup ten years later. Since they give out two awards each year, I wonder what the other 18 guys did. Off the top of my head only Alan Kay comes to mind as being more deserving.

Who knew?

[Marginal Coward]

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.)

Re:Ppl who don't know C++ slamming C++

[hey!]

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.

Is FORTRAN still winning? Was Re:Poor Alan Kay

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Till about FORTRAN 77 it was clearly beating C in scientific computations. But that was mainly because Fortran used static memory allocations and C was littered will malloc and associated overheads. With Fortran99, dynamic memory allocations came to Fortran too. At this point I figured it must be just badly hampered C, all the pain and not much gain. Have not tried it personally.

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.

Re:Is FORTRAN still winning? Was Re:Poor Alan Kay

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the reasons compilers can often still better optimize FORTRAN code is that FORTRAN makes stronger guarantees about aliasing than C++ does. The lack of such guarantees constrain C++ compilers by introducing more antidependencies that restrict code motion, although in practice most of them are not actually antidependencies.

Compilers are getting better over time at sorting that out, but sometimes it can't be sorted out because there isn't enough information available statically to do so.

I'm not a FORTRAN programmer and don't particularly like the language, but FORTRAN is still where it's at for high performance computation. And FORTRAN is a better language today than FORTRAN77 was back in the day!

Ken Thompson on C++

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Ken Thompson on C++

[Anonymous Coward]

Stroustrup might agree that he's not necessarily brilliant in the same way Thompson was, but he is disciplined and dogged and willing to talk to people and compromise. He took his job as maintainer of C++ seriously, and was willing to keep at it for three decades, which is something that Nicklaus Wirth didn't do as creator of Pascal for instance. He's been able to attract very intelligent, very dedicated folks to the C++ standardization effort, people who don't resort to juvenile flame wars as we often see breaking out in open source projects.

I don't think it was fair to say that Stroustrup caved and took whatever proposals anybody had. For example, people have been asking for, and proposing implementations for garbage collection in C++ for more than 20 years, but it's still not in the standard. There is no standard GUI or windowing API, or standards for enterprise application server frameworks, or anything matching wall of books that came out of SunSoft/Oracle for the Java API's. When Stroustrup through his lot behind STL, he was implicitly rejecting many competing proposals, including those submitted by his friends and long time colleagues at Bell Labs. Given the change in paradigm that STL represented relative to the mainstream of O-O collection class libraries, that took guts.