4/13/2010
Written by
Congratulations to University of Illinois computer science professor Ralph Johnson and his "Gang of Four" colleagues on receiving the 2010 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award. The Outstanding Research Award is presented to an individual or group who has made significant and lasting research contributions to the theory or practice of software engineering. The "Gang of Four" (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides) were given the award "for their numerous contributions, including Design Patterns," a ground-breaking book they co-authored in 1994. Since then, over 500,000 copies of this seminal book have been sold in English and in 13 other languages.
Johnson was one of the originators of the software patterns movement, organizing the first conference on patterns, as well as writing many of the first papers on the subject. He believes that software will never become engineering until there are catalogs of designs that can be reused, and so has been documenting these designs, both as frameworks and as patterns. Johnson also led the group that developed the first refactoring tool, the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser. Johnson has worked on frameworks for compilers, operating systems, graphics editors, music generation, network protocol stacks, telephone billing, insurance, and stellar simulation.
At Illinois, Johnson leads the parallel programming patterns work and co-organizes the ParaPLoP workshops on parallel programming patterns for the Universal Parallel Computing Research Center. Johnson teaches courses in Software Engineering, Software Architecture, and Object-Oriented Programming and Design.
The ACM Special Interest Group on Software Engineering provides a forum for computing professionals from industry, government and academia to examine principles, practices, and new research results in software engineering. They seek to improve their ability to engineer software by stimulating interaction among practitioners, researchers, and educators; by fostering the professional development of software engineers; and by representing software engineers to professional, legal, and political entities.
More information about SIGSOFT and the Outstanding Research Award can be found on their website at http://www.sigsoft.org/.