David Parnas
David Lorge Parnas is a Canadian early pioneer of software engineering, who developed the concept of information hiding in modular programming, which is an important element of object-oriented programming today. He is also noted for his advocacy of precise documentation.
Life
Parnas earned his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in electrical engineering. Parnas also earned a professional engineering license in Canada and was one of the first to apply traditional engineering principles to software design.He worked there as a professor for many years. He also taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, at the Department of [Computer Science of TU Darmstadt|Department of Computer Science] of the Technische Universität Darmstadt, the University of Victoria, Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and University of Limerick.
David Parnas received a number of awards and honors:
- ACM "Best Paper" Award, 1979
- Norbert Wiener Award for Social and Professional Responsibility, 1987
- Two "Most Influential Paper" awards International Conference on Software Engineering, 1991 and 1995
- Doctor honoris causa of the Computer Science Department, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, 1986
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, 1992
- Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, 1994
- Doctor honoris causa of the Louvain School of Engineering, University of Louvain, Belgium, 1996
- ACM SIGSOFT's "Outstanding Research" award, 1998
- IEEE Computer Society's 60th Anniversary Award, 2007
- Doctor honoris causa of the Faculty of Informatics, University of Lugano, Switzerland, 2008
- Fellow of the Gesellschaft für Informatik, 2008
- Fellow of the Institute of [Electrical and Electronics Engineers], 2009
- Doctor honoris causa of the Vienna University of Technology, Vienna Austria, 2011
Work