Aarhus Universitets segl

AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize to Magnus Madsen

Congratulations to assistant professor Magnus Madsen who received the junior AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize during ECOOP 2022 in Berlin last week. Magnus received the recognition for his work on Flix – a next-generation reliable, safe, concise, and functional-first programming language.

Assistant professor Magnus Madsen
Assistant professor Magnus Madsen win the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize. Photo by Søren Kjeldgaard.

Magnus Madsen is the lead designer of the Flix programming language. Flix is a new functional, imperative, and logic programming language under development by programming language researchers at Aarhus University, the University of Waterloo, Universität Tübingen, and by a growing community of open-source contributors. Notable features include its support for first-class Datalog constraints and its polymorphic type and effect system.

The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prizes are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, two pioneers in the area of programming and simulation. Their foundational work on object-oriented programming, made concrete in the Simula language, is one of the most important inventions in software engineering. Their key ideas were expressed already around 1965, but took over 20 years to be absorbed and appreciated by the broader software community. After that, object-orientation has profoundly transformed the landscape of software design and development techniques. It was a great loss to our community that both Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard passed away in 2002. In remembrance of their scholarship and enthusiastic encouragement of young researchers, in 2004 AITO established a prize to be awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential for following in the footsteps of these two pioneers.