Ole-Johan Dahl | |
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| Born | (1931-10-12)12 October 1931 |
| Died | 29 June 2002(2002-06-29) (aged 70) Asker, Norway |
| Education | University of Oslo (BS,MS) |
| Known for | Simula Object-oriented programming |
| Awards | Turing Award (2001) IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2002) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Norwegian Computing Center University of Oslo |
Ole-Johan Dahl (12 October 1931 – 29 June 2002) was a Norwegiancomputer scientist. Dahl was a professor of computer science at theUniversity of Oslo and is considered to be one of the fathers ofSimula andobject-oriented programming along withKristen Nygaard.[1][2] In 2001, Dahl and Nygaard won the ACMTuring Award.
Dahl was born inMandal, Norway. He was the son of Finn Dahl (1898–1962) and Ingrid Othilie Kathinka Pedersen (1905–80). When he was seven, his family moved toDrammen. When he was thirteen, the whole family fled to Sweden during theGerman occupation of Norway inWorld War II. After the war's end, Dahl studied numericalmathematics at the University of Oslo.[1]
Dahl became a fullprofessor at theUniversity of Oslo in 1968 and was a gifted teacher as well as researcher. Here he worked onHierarchical Program Structures, probably his most influential publication, which appeared co-authored withC.A.R. Hoare in the influential bookStructured Programming of 1972 by Dahl,Edsger Dijkstra, and Hoare, perhaps the best-known academic book concerning software in the 1970s. As his career advanced, Dahl grew increasingly interested in the use offormal methods, to rigorously reason about object-orientation for example. His expertise ranged from the practical application of ideas to their formal mathematical underpinning to ensure the validity of the approach.[3]
Dahl is widely accepted as Norway's foremost computer scientist. With Kristen Nygaard, he produced the initial ideas for object-oriented (OO) programming in the 1960s at theNorwegian Computing Center (Norsk Regnesentral (NR)) as part of theSimula I (1961–1965) and Simula 67 (1965–1968)simulationprogramming languages, which began as an extended variant andsuperset ofALGOL 60.[4] Dahl and Nygaard were the first to develop the concepts ofclass,subclass (allowing implicitinformation hiding),inheritance,dynamic object creation, etc., all important aspects of the OO paradigm. Anobject is a self-contained component (with a data structure and associated procedures ormethods) in a software system. These are combined to form a complete system. The object-oriented approach is now pervasive in modernsoftware development, including widely used imperative programming languages such asC++ andJava.
He received theTuring Award for his work in 2001 (withKristen Nygaard). He received the 2002Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)John von Neumann Medal (with Kristen Nygaard)[5] and was named Commander of theRoyal Norwegian Order of St. Olav in 2000.[6]
TheAssociation Internationale pour les Technologies Objets named theDahl-Nygaard Prize after Dahl.[7]
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