Simula: Mother tongue for a generation of nordic programmers

Abstract

With Simula 67 Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard invented object-oriented programming. This has had an enormous impact on program development tools and methods in the world, well accounted in conferences and books, on programming languages and object-oriented programming, and on software pioneers. Early influenced were computer scientists in the Nordic countries who from about 1970 had Simula as the main programming tool, “mother tongue.” This paper gives a first-hand account of experience of a unique early introduction of object-oriented programming for higher education in computer science and in computer programming, which provided powerful program development tools long before other educational institutions, especially as it coincided with the introduction of powerful interactive systems. The paper also challenges the misconception that Simula is primarily a tool for simulation by illustrating how it was used to teach general computer science and programming concepts with more general-purpose c nstructs than most contemporary languages, except perhaps Lisp.