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 44

scientist at Xerox Park in Palo Alto and a consultant and lecturer at Apple's Ad-
vanced Technology Group.
In the fall of 1988 “The Second European Conference on Object-Oriented Pro-
gramming, ECOOP-88” was held in Oslo. It gathered close to 400 scientists from all
over the world and was recognition to the fact that the cradle of object-oriented pro-
gramming stood in Norway.
The project teams that Nygaard engaged in the development of BETA in Norway
and in Denmark were later involved in creating ODSL [14] for the International Tele-
communications Union and later in creating the de facto standard modelling language
UML [26] that is used throughout the world today.
In the eighties Nygaard also became the chairman of the Steering Committee for a
Cost-13 (EEC) financed European research project on the study of the extensions of
profession oriented languages necessary when artificial intelligence and information
technology are becoming part of professional work 7 . With this initiative he once again
wanted to be in the forefront of the development.
After he retired from the University of Oslo in 1996, he became the leader of
GOODS (General Object-Oriented Distributed Systems) [21], a 3-year Research
Council of Norway (RCN) supported project, aimed at enriching object-oriented lan-
guages and system development methods with new basic concepts that make it possi-
ble to describe the relation between layered and/or distributed programs and the
hardware and people carrying out these programs.
In 2002, shortly before Nygaard passed away, his last proposal received reluctant
financial support from RCN. The COOL project (Comprehensive Object-Oriented
Learning) was a 3-year interdisciplinary research project proposal launched by a con-
sortium of four Norwegian research institutions, supported by research institutions in
Aarhus, Denmark, with the intention of cooperating with test sites available through
Nygaard's large personal international contact network. His idea was to produce an
object-oriented “ Learning Landscape ” of pedagogical and organisational components.
The proposal shows again the wide range in his ideas and that he always had visions
for his work . After Nygaard passed away, the project was partly redefined and its
global visions were toned down. Still, his inspiration and perspectives for COOL
remained and resulted in a topic offering the learner's perspective into the challenges
of learning object-orientation [6].
7 Engagement in Politics
Nygaard had always been engaged in politics. He was active as a student and took
part in strategic work for Venstre, a social liberal party at the centre of Norwegian
party politics. He left the party at the end of the sixties because “ I started doubting my
engagement in traditional party politics, and left the Liberal Party when I realized I
had become a socialist” [20]. In the sixties he worked and had positions in Natur-
vernforbundet, Norway's largest environmental conservation organization, and was
7 A profession oriented language (POL) is a high-level language that, for the purpose of e.g.
participatory design or system description and development, combines natural language con-
cepts oriented towards a particular profession with concepts related to information processing
[24].