By Rob Knies, Managing Editor, Microsoft Research
Luca Cardelli, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge, has been named winner of the 2007 Senior Dahl-Nygaard Prize, presented annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions.
Cardelli, who heads the Programming Principles and Tools team at the Cambridge lab, was cited for his overall contribution to both theory and practice for object-oriented languages.
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Luca Cardelli, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Cambridge
The prize was award in Berlin on Aug. 2 during the 21st European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. Both Cardelli and Jonathan Aldrich, winner of the junior award, delivered keynote presentations during the event.
The award is named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, pioneers in programming and simulation. Both Dahl and Nygaard died in 2002, and in the memory, the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets established a prize to be awarded each year to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated the potential to emulate the achievements of Dahl and Nygaard.
Aldrich, of Carnegie Mellon University, was honored for his recent contribution to expressing and verifying software architecture in object-oriented languages. He develops lightweight ways to statically assure architectural characteristics of large, real-world object-oriented systems.
The award citation states, in part:
“Luca Cardelli systematically developed typing theories for objects, from record types to bounded quantification, eventually leading to the famous book A Theory of Objects, published with Martín Abadi in 1996. This masterpiece develops an ‘object calculus’ as a foundation for object-oriented languages, in much the same way that [Alonzo] Church’s lambda-calculus is a foundation for procedural languages. Overall, Luca’s work was inspired by strong expertise on language design in the domain of mobility and locality with contributions such as Obliq and Ambient. The 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. This work on mobility indirectly led to his recent interest in Systems Biology.”
The foundational work Dahl and Nygaard accomplished on object-oriented programming, made concrete in the Simula language, is one of the most important inventions in software engineering. Their key ideas, initially expressed in the mid-‘60s, took more than 20 years to gain wide acceptance by the broader software community, but since then, object-orientation has transformed the landscape of software design and development.
Programming languages and software engineering