Thursday, 7 November – 8:30-10:00

The Development of the Key Object-Oriented Concepts

Kristen Nygaard
Senior Researcher, Norwegian Computing Center, Professor (emeritus) University of Oslo
Ole-Johan Dahl
Professor (emeritus), University of Oslo

The lecture will trace in detail the development of the key object-oriented concepts: objects, classes, quasi-parallel (really multi-threaded) program execution, inheritance (classes and subclasses) and virtual entities, and describe the setting in which this happened."

Speakers

Kristen Nygaard is professor (emeritus) of informatics at the University of Oslo, and senior researcher at the Norwegian Computing Center. Together with Ole-Johan Dahl he developed the key object-oriented programming concepts at the Norwegian Computing Center from 1961-67. Professor Nygaard was involved in large-scale simulation studies at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment from 1949-60. He continued his work on object-orientation, and did research on systems development (the "Scandinavian School"), participative system design, and societal consequences of information technology. With Danish colleagues, he invented Beta, a general object-oriented language. He is now active in the COOL Project (Comprehensive Object-Oriented Learning), developing new tools for teaching object-orientation.

Professor Dahl also worked at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, and joined the Simula project as an experienced designer and implementer of basic software as well as high level programming language. In 1968, Dahl became the first professor of informatics at the University of Oslo, responsible for establishing research and education programs in this rapidly expanding field. After Simula, his focus on computer program verification led to the development of his theory of constructive types and subtypes based on computer-aided concept formation and reasoning.

The lecture will be presented by Professor Kristen Nygaard.