CMU’s Jonathan Aldrich, assistant professor in the Institute for Software Research (ISR) in CMU’s School of Computer Science, received the 2007 AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for his groundbreaking work in object-oriented programming.
Software is among the most complex projects that humans engineer today, with codes that may be millions of pages, a staggering amount of information to keep in your head, says Aldrich. Keeping everyone on the same page by providing a map of the system—especially in companies where engineers are scattered around the world—is critical or the entire system could fail.
Aldrich’s pioneering work developing ArchJava, an extension of the Java programming language, was the first to mathematically link a blueprint of the overall architecture of an object-oriented system with the actual execution of the system.
It’s a bit like checking what a contractor has done against the architectural drawing, Aldrich adds. “We all experience problems with software and many bugs come from its sheer complexity,” explains Aldrich. “When the rubber meets the road, you have to connect it to the source code and make sure that connection is real.”
Aldrich shared the spotlight in Berlin, Germany this month with Luca Cardelli of Microsoft Research in Cambridge, England, who will receive the Senior Prize for his overall contribution to both theory and practice for object-oriented languages.The Dahl-Nygaard prizes are the most prestigious awards given for work in object-oriented programming.
Writer: Deb Smit
Source: Jonathan Aldrich, CMU
Image courtesy of Jonathan Aldrich, CMU