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."
In memory of Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard
Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard - the founders of object-oriented programming - have passed away this summer with just a few weeks in between. The software community has lost two great pioneers that through their collaboration in the nineteen-sixties leading to the Simula language and object-oriented programming have had enormous influence on software technology. For their work they were given the A.M. Turing Award: "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has presented the 2001 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," to Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard of Norway for their role in the invention of object-oriented programming, the most widely used programming model today." (From ACM press release on February 6, 2002).
Kristen Nygaard was supposed to give his Turing award lecture at OOPSLA 2002 where he would have talked about The Development of the Key Object-Oriented Concepts. Simula contributed constructs such as object, class, subclass, virtual entity, active object and the first example of an application framework. Simula was originally designed as a simulation language, with the purpose of supporting analysis of large and complex systems. This had the impact that modelling capabilities of languages always have been central to the Scandinavian School of Object-Orientation.
In this talk a long term collaborator with Kristen Nygaard will present the main contributions of Simula and further development of object-oriented programming made through more than 25 years of collaboration with Nygaard.
Ole Lehrmann Madsen (www.daimi.au.dk/~olm) is a professor of Computer Science, Aarhus University, and director of the Alexandra Institute A/S (www.alexandra.dk) - a joint venture between universities, companies and public institutions to promote private and public co-operation within IT research. He is a co-founder and chairman of the board for Mjolner Informatics (www.mjolner.com). He has worked with object-technology for more than 25 years starting with Simula programming. He developed the BETA programming language together with Kristen Nygaard, Birger Moller-Pedersen and Bent Bruun Kristensen, and he has been a research manager for the Mjolner project where the first version of the BETA software was developed. He is now active in Center for Pervasive Computing (www.pervasive.dk) where he works with object-technology in a pervasive computing context, including several projects with industry.