---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2002 04:35:18 -0400
From: Dave Farber <dave at farber.net>
Reply-To: farber at cis.upenn.edu
To: ip <ip-sub-1 at majordomo.pobox.com>
Subject: IP: Kristen Nygaard 1926-2002


------ Forwarded Message
From: Larry Tesler <tesler at pobox.com>
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2002 21:39:07 -0700
To: David Farber <farber at central.cis.upenn.edu>
Subject: Kristen Nygaard 1926-2002

Dave,

On August 7, you posted an obituary for Ole-Johan Dahl, written by
his long-time colleague, Kristen Nygaard. Two days later, and three
weeks short of his 76th birthday, Kristen left us as well.

Kristen's numerous accomplishments during a vibrant fifty-four-year
career can be seen at http://www.ifi.uio.no/~kristen. Some of them
can be inferred from his obituary of Dahl. I will mention just a few
highlights, and add some personal notes.

During the 1960's, Kristen and Ole-Johan designed the first
object-oriented language, Simula. Its second incarnation, Simula 67,
inspired both Smalltalk and C++.

In the 1970's, Kristen was an early advocate of user participation in
industrial systems design. His social research into the impacts of
new technology on workers influenced landmark union-management
agreements and legislation, in Norway and other countries.

In the 1980's, Kristen and colleagues completed the design and
implementation of Beta, an object-oriented language with ambitious
goals. Beta unified procedure parameter lists and objects into a
single abstraction called a "pattern".

In the early 1990's, Kristen led a political organization that
persuaded the Norwegian electorate to reject membership in the
European Union. After the victorious vote, he retreated from public
view to resume research and teaching.

In June 2002, he secured research funding for COOL, a project aimed
at improving the teaching of object-oriented design.

During his career, Kristen won numerous prestigious awards. In 1990,
CPSR awarded him the Norbert Weiner Prize. This year, he and
Ole-Johan shared the ACM Turing Award and the IEEE von Neumann Medal.

I first met Kristen at the January 1978 ACM SIGPLAN Conference on the
History of Programming Languages. The following year, during my first
trip to Europe, he and I began what turned out to be a lifelong
exchange of visits.

In both the lecture hall and the living room, Kristen was a
raconteur. His delightful stories and boisterous jokes were
especially unrestrained when fueled by adequate quantities of aquavit.

One sabbatical year, Kristen and his indomitable wife, Johanna, lived
in a house of mine in Palo Alto. That experience gave the activist
duo an unforeseen modicum of appreciation for the positive attributes
of American society.

I once encountered Kristen unexpectedly at a hotel near Heathrow
Airport. He had come to London to attend a dinner with the Queen of
England. He was about to take an afternoon nap in preparation.
Inexplicably, the hotel did not place the 5:00 p.m. wake-up call that
he requested. He slept too late to attend.

He must have been disappointed, for the trip from Oslo was
essentially wasted. But at breakfast the next day, he simply laughed
it off, explaining that the hotel had also made a second mistake.
They had placed a wake-up call that morning that Kristen had not
requested. That call came at precisely 5:00 a.m.

In January, Kristen frankly discussed his mortality with my wife and
me. He presciently told Colleen that he did not expect to see her
again. Still, his sudden heart attack last Friday night came as a
shock to everyone. Many of his friends were looking forward to seeing
him in November at OOPSLA, where he was to deliver the Turing lecture.

I will miss Kristen's periodic phone calls, in which he would
identify himself by saying the single word, "Ja", before launching
directly into a travel itinerary, a status report, or a Macintosh
question. I will miss his wisdom, humor, compassion, affection, and
joie de vivre. He was a dear friend to many, and to me.

Larry Tesler


------ End of Forwarded Message

For archives see:
http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/