Most Influential OOPSLA Paper Award

Recipients:

2008 (for 1998): Ownership Types for Flexible Alias Protection, David G. Clarke, John M. Potter, and James Noble

Citation

In their 1998 OOPSLA paper, "Ownership Types for Flexible Protection," David Clarke, John Potter, and James Noble introduced the notion of "ownership types" to control inter-object aliasing statically, making it easier to reason about the dynamic topology of an object-oriented program. This work is part of the broader trend of trying to handle issues of isolation and modularity while retaining expressiveness.

2007 (for 1997): Call Graph Construction in Object-Oriented Languages, David Grove, Greg DeFouw, Jeffrey Dean, and Craig Chambers

Citation

In their 1997 OOPSLA paper "Call Graph Construction in Object-Oriented Languages," David Grove, Greg DeFouw, Jeffrey Dean, and Craig Chambers studied the existing algorithms for call-graph construction in object-oriented languages and brought them together into a unified framework. This framework is both theoretical, allowing the authors to compare the precision of the different algorithms, and also practical in that they built a single parameterized implementation of all of the algorithms. This implementation allowed them to conduct a thorough empirical evaluation of the algorithms, which had not been previously possible because the algorithms had been implemented separately and applied to different programs. In the process, the authors discovered and evaluated a few new variations suggested by their framework. This kind of consolidation paper is important for moving the field forward since it provides theoretical models to build on and performance evaluations as benchmarks. It has served as a model for later work of this kind.

The Most Influential OOPSLA Paper Award was instituted in 2006. To cover the years from the inception of OOPSLA (1986) to 1996, the OOPSLA steering committee formed a committee to select the three most influential OOPSLA papers that were presented during that time period. The three most influential OOPSLA papers from 1986-1996:

Subject Oriented Programming: A Critique of Pure Objects, William Harrison and Harold Ossher

Concepts and Experiments in Computational Reflection, Pattie Maes

Self: The Power of Simplicity, David Ungar and Randall B. Smith

Selection Committee

The award given in year N is for the most influential paper presented at the conference held in year N-10. The selection committee consists of the following members:

• the current SIGPLAN Chair,
• the General Chair and Program Chair for OOPSLA N-10,
• the General Chair and Program Chair for OOPSLA N-1, and
• a member of the SIGPLAN EC appointed by the OOPSLA Chair.

The committee is chaired by the SIGPLAN Chair. The SIGPLAN Chair shall adjudicate conflicts of interest, appointing substitutes to the committee as necessary.