Congrats to Dave for receiving the Dahl-Nygaard Prize for Outstanding Work in Object-Oriented Programming!

http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/pr.nsf/pages/news.david_ungar-dahl-nygaa...

"Kaiserslautern, GERMANY,May, 11, 2009 David Ungar, of IBM Research, will receive the 2009 Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize for his groundbreaking work in the field of object-orientation. The Dahl-Nygaard Prize will recognize Ungar's complete body of work, most notably for his role in inventing Self, the object-oriented programming language based on the concept of prototypes.

Object-oriented programming helps people build more sophisticated computer software by dividing up a program into a number of separate bundles, each possessing the data and behavior needed to do a particular job.

The Dahl-Nygaard prizes are the most prestigious awards given for work in object-oriented programming. Established in 2004 by the Association Internationale Pour les Technologies Objets (AITO), they are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, who developed the first object-oriented programming language.

Self, co-invented with Randall B. Smith, Craig Chambers, Urs Hölzle, and developed with Ole Agesen, Lars Bak, Elgin Lee, John Maloney, and Mario Wolczko, has had a profound effect upon the field of computer programming. It introduced advanced adaptive compilation technology, and inspired a number of languages based on its concepts, including JavaScript, which has become one of the most popular tools for developing dynamic web pages. The technologies introduced in Self have only been partially realized, and we can expect them to continue to create an impact in the coming years.

In addition to his roles in inventing the elegant Self language and in enabling managed runtimes with generational garbage collection, Ungar has improved the user experience of object-oriented and other systems with his 1993 paper co-authored with Bay-Wei Chang, titled "Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface.” This innovative work applied cartoon animation techniques to the legibility of user interfaces. In 2004 it won the lasting impact award at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Ungar and Smith's Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications (OOPSLA) paper in 1987 entitled, "Self: The Power of Simplicity," was also previously recognized in 2006 as one of the three most influential OOPSLA papers from 1986 to 1996.

Ungar will be honored at the 2009 European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) which takes place from July 6-10 in Genova, Italy.

Ungar graduated as a doctor of philosophy in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. His doctoral advisor was David Patterson and his dissertation was entitled "The Design and Evaluation of a High-Performance Smalltalk System" it won an 1986 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. He was an assistant professor at Stanford University, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Computer Systems Lab, where in addition to working on Self, he taught programming languages and computer architecture, from 1985 to 1990.

Thereafter, he moved to Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he and Randall B. Smith co-led the Self effort. Subsequently, Ungar helped Sun harness Self's implementation technology for their Java virtual machine, and was honored within Sun as a Distinguished Engineer. In 2006 he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the Association for Computing Machinery.

In 2007, Ungar joined the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Lab and is currently working within the Dynamic Optimization Group. He holds 20 patents.

Previous IBM winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prize include John Vlissides, who posthumously won the prize in 2006. "