Jonathan Aldrich Receives Dahl-Nygaard Prize for Outstanding Work in Object-Oriented Programming

Jonathan Aldrich will receive the 2007 AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his groundbreaking work in object-oriented programming, the dominant programming paradigm in industry. He shares the spotlight with Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research who will receive the Senior Prize for his overall contribution to both theory and practice for object-oriented languages. Jonathan AldrichAldrich's work tackles one of the most important challenges in industrial software development: getting the large-scale structure of programs right. Software is among the most complex artifacts that humans engineer today, with programs exceeding a million pages of code. Software companies may have hundreds or thousands of engineers scattered around the globe. If any one of them accidentally introduces any code that is inconsistent with a system's design, the entire system could fail. Aldrich is being honored for developing ArchJava, an extension of the Java programming language that encodes the high-level structure of a system inside the code and uses automated analysis tools to verify that the code is consistent with that structure. The goal of his work is to summarize the architectural design of huge software systems on a single page, then automatically ensure that all million pages of code are consistent with that summary over time.