The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2022

AITO is happy to announce the winners of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2022.

The Senior Prize is awarded to Dan Ingalls.

The Junior Prize is awarded to Magnus Madsen.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2022 were given during ECOOP 2022 held in Berlin, Germany, June 06-10 2022.

Dan Ingalls

Dan Ingalls was the main implementor of the Smalltalk-80 system and its precursors, Smalltalk-72, Smalltalk-76, and Smalltalk-78. He is responsible for much of the detailed design of the Smalltalk language and system, as well as the formulation of key object-oriented design principles. Dan also invented BitBlt, a general-purpose graphical operation, and pop up menus, making window systems and GUIs a reality. He made the unique Smalltalk environment what it is, with its support for pure object-orientation, reflection, live programming, and persistence.

Later, Dan led the development of Squeak, a practical and very compact Smalltalk system with a virtual machine written entirely in Smalltalk. Squeak and its offshoots like Pharo continue to have a thriving open-source community. Based on Squeak, Dan worked on several other pioneering live programming systems such as the Lively Kernel for web programming, and EToys, an educational programming environment. EToys was the direct forerunner of Scratch, with its huge influence on education and programming for children

Dan's work has had enormous impact, foreshadowing modern computing in many ways.

Magnus Madsen

Magnus Madsen is the leader behind Flix, a declarative language for implementing modular and expressive program analyses. Flix seamlessly integrates logic, functional and imperative features, and supports interoperability with Java. The language has a solid implementation and runs on the JVM. Notable applications of Flix include high-level declarative implementations of interprocedural analysis frameworks like IFDS and IDE, a new polymorphic effect system for tracking side-effects, and a novel expressive type system for nullability.

Magnus has also done noteworthy work on static and dynamic analysis for JavaScript, in particular for reasoning about asynchrony in applications with events and promises, and for developing practical bug-finding tools.

The Members of the 2022 Dahl-Nygaard Award Committee are:

• Görel Hedin (Chair)

• Patrick Eugster

• Bruno C. d. S. Oliveira

• Elena Zucca

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 2021, it has 59 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul.