Thursday, 7 November – 8:30-10:00 – Exhibit Hall 4B

The Scandinavian School of Object-Orientation
- in memory of Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard

Ole Lehrmann Madsen
Professor of Computer Science, Aarhus University and Director of the Alexandra Institute A/S

Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard-the founders of object-oriented programming-passed away this summer within just a few weeks of each other. The software community has lost two great pioneers who, through their collaboration in the 1960s leading to the Simula language and object-oriented programming, have had enormous influence on software technology. "For their role in the invention of object-oriented programming, the most widely used programming model today," they were given the A.M. Turing Award. (From the ACM press release on February 6, 2002).

Kristen Nygaard was to give his Turing award lecture at OOPSLA 2002 on Simula and its development. Simula was originally designed as a simulation language, with the purpose of supporting analysis of large and complex systems. Because of this, the modelling capabilities of languages always have been central to the Scandinavian school of object orientation.

In this lecture, Ole Lehrmann Madsen, a long term collaborator of Kristen Nygaard's, will present the main contributions of Simula along with further developments in object-oriented programming made through more than 25 years of work with Nygaard.

Speaker

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.