Thanks Larry --

Friends --

      It seems impossible that both of these great men could have died 
within a week of each other. I did not know Dahl well. He was a very 
quiet man and looked at things very differently than I. But I was a 
close friend, even a kind of soul mate, to Kristen. I'll never forget 
when I met both of them. It was during the first HOPL. On the way to 
the conference Dahl and Tony Hoare stopped by PARC to visit, and I 
gave them a demo of Smalltalk. Neither understood a word I said. 
Needless to say, I was crushed. It was seeing in 1966 the first 
Simula after seeing Sketchpad that catalysed my earliest biologically 
oriented ideas about objects.
      After the HOPL conference, Kristen stopped by and I gave him the 
same demo. What a difference! He not only understood everything I 
said, but often told me what I was going to show him next. He had 
been thinking about further steps and he was completely thrilled to 
see many of these ideas already in Smalltalk. We were great friends 
from that day onwards. I have given many thousands of demos in the 
last 40 years, but that was the one that meant the most to me.
      Kristen, we miss you terribly.

Sincerely to all,

Alan

---------

At 7:02 AM -0700 8/12/02, Sean McGrath wrote:
>---------- 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/


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