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 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