The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2017

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2017.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Gilad Bracha.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Ross Tate.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2017 will be given during ECOOP 2017 in Barcelona, Spain, in June 2017.

Gilad Bracha has done outstanding work on many topics relevant to the field of object-orientation, including mixins, Java generics, Strongtalk and Newspeak. He has been a deeply involved and highly respected member of the OO community for a long time.

Ross Tate has made fundamental contributions to type systems with applications to OO languages. This includes the discovery that although wildcards as in Java are undecidable in theory, programmers only use specific flavors of wildcards which keeps them decidable in practice (PLDI'11); similarly, he proposed that F-bounded polymorphism can be replaced by simpler concepts, which were sufficient for the use that programmers made of generics in a large corpus (PLDI'14). Finally, he discovered that Java wildcards and Scala path-dependent types, in combination with implicit null pointers, make the languages unsound (OOPSLA'16). In addition, he has had strong industrial impact via his involvement in the production languages Ceylon (Red Hat) and Kotlin (JetBrains).

The Members of the 2017 Dahl-Nygaard Award Committee were:

• Frank Tip (chair)

• Andrew P. Black

• Heather Miller

• James Noble

• Tobias Wrigstad

The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prizes are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, two pioneers in the area of programming and simulation. Their foundational work on object-oriented programming, made concrete in the Simula language, is one of the most important inventions in software engineering. Their key ideas were expressed already around 1965, but took over 20 years to be absorbed and appreciated by the broader software community. After that, object-orientation has profoundly transformed the landscape of software design and development techniques. It was a great loss to our community that both Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard passed away in 2002. In remembrance of their scholarship and enthusiastic encouragement of young researchers, in 2004 AITO established a prize to be awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential for following in the footsteps of these two pioneers.

AITO (Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of object technology. As of January 2015, it has 46 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul. For further information, visit www.aito.org.