Dr. Dobb's | Prizes Awarded for Work in Object-Oriented Programming

Prizes Awarded for Work in Object-Oriented Programming

Dahl-Nygaard Prizes to Cardelli and Aldrich for outstanding work in object-oriented programming

June 26, 2007
URL:http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/prizes-awarded-for-work-in-object-orient/200000686

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2007 will be awarded to Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research and Jonathan Aldrich of Carnegie Mellon University for their work in object-oriented programming. Aldrich will receive the Junior Prize and Cardelli the Senior Prize. The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes, established in 2004 by the Association Internationale Pour les Technologies Objets (AITO), are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard who developed Simula, considered the first object-oriented programming language.

Cardelli received the Senior prize for his overall contribution to both theory and practice for object-oriented languages, and to Aldrich, the Junior prize for his contributionsto expressing and verifying software architecturesin object-oriented languages.

Cardelli systematically developed typing theories for objects, from record types to bounded quantification, eventually leading to his book A Theory of Objects, published with Martin Abadi in 1996. This book develops an "object calculus" as a foundation for object-oriented languages, in much the same way that Church's lambda-calculus is a foundation for procedural languages. Overall, Cardelli's work was inspired by expertise on language design, including functional languages and theory, such as ML, and object-oriented languages such as Modula-3. This led Cardelli to language design in the areas of mobility and locality with contributions such as Obliq and Ambient. Ambient Calculus (developed with Andy Gordon) enables the formal analysis of mobile and wide-area systems, in part by taking advantage of a decade of previous work on process algebra.

Aldrich develops lightweight ways to statically assure architectural characteristics of large object-oriented systems. His thesis work on ArchJava was the first system to verify at compile time that the dynamic structure of an object-oriented application conforms to an abstract, hierarchical software architecture.

ArchJava tackles challenging aspects of object-oriented systems, including aliasing, reentrancy, inheritance, and the use of sophisticated design patterns. Aldrich's research is grounded in formal soundness proofs yet is validated through case study evaluations with realistic software systems and tasks. More recently, Aldrich has made contributions in other aspects of object-oriented architecture assurance, including object protocol checking, modularity in aspect-oriented programming, and novel object models.

The prizes will be awarded at ECOOP 2007. Previous recipients of the prizes include Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and the late John Vlissides, and Bertrand Meyer and Gail Murphy.