The Many Dimensions of Kristen Nygaard, Creator of Object-Oriented Programming and the Scandinavian School of System Development - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 38

The Many Dimensions of Kristen Nygaard,
Creator of Object-Oriented Programming and
the Scandinavian School of System Development

Drude Berntsen 1 , Knut Elgsaas 2 , and Håvard Hegna 3

1 Director at the Norwegian Computing Center 1970-1989
[e-mail]
2 Researcher/Project Director at the Norwegian Computing Center 1963-1973
[e-mail]
3 Senior Research Scientist at the Norwegian Computing Center 1962-2006
[e-mail]

Abstract. Professor Kristen Nygaard (1926-2002) was a multi-talented scientist
whose achievements were amply honoured in his later years. For general read-
ers of Computer Science history Nygaard will be recognized as the creator with
Professor Ole-Johan Dahl of the SIMULA programming languages and object-
oriented programming. But Nygaard also had a social and political engagement
that over the years brought him from a liberal-democratic to a socialist position
where solidarity and empowerment were the major chords. This paper gives a
condensed descriptive tour of the life of this many-sided computer scientist with
an emphasis on how the scientific and political sides of Nygaard worked hand
in hand, leading to his active cooperation with the trade unions and making him
a strong advocator of the Scandinavian School of System Development and
Participatory Design.

Keywords: Kristen Nygaard, computer history, object-oriented programming,
operations research, participatory design, The Norwegian Computing Center.

1 Introduction

Many people are characterized as great. What constitutes great people? There is no
simple answer. How do you measure greatness? Was Professor Kristen Nygaard
(1926-2002) a great man? Maybe not, but in our view Nygaard
set a high standard against which you can measure other peo-
ple's greatness.
Alan C. Kay, the creator of the Smalltalk programming lan-
guage, once expressed that “ Kristen Nygaard is a guy who is
larger than life in almost any possible dimension ” [10]. Strong
words, too strong one would say if judging Nygaard's place in
information processing only by his ground-breaking work with
Professor Ole-Johan Dahl to establish the SIMULA language
and object-oriented programming.

Kristen Nygaard in
the mid-1990s