David Michael Ungar, an
American
American(s) may refer to:
* American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America"
** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America
** American ancestry, pe ...
computer scientist, co-created the
Self
The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhoo ...
programming language with Randall Smith. The SELF development environment's animated user experience was described in the paper ''Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface'' co-written with Bay-Wei Chang, which won a lasting impact award at the
ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
The ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) is an annual conference for technical innovations in human–computer interfaces. UIST is sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and ACM SIGGRAPH. By impact factor, it is one of impactful confere ...
2004.
Ungar graduated as a
doctor of philosophy
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in computer science from the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, in 1985.
His doctoral advisor was
David Patterson and his dissertation was entitled ''The Design and Evaluation of a High-Performance Smalltalk System''; it won the 1986
ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to the authors of the best doctoral dissertations in computer science and computer engineering. The award is accompanied by a prize of US $20,000 ...
.
He was an assistant professor at
Stanford University, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Computer Systems Lab, where he taught programming languages and computer architecture, from 1985 to 1990.
In 1991, he joined
Sun Microsystems and became a distinguished engineer.
In 2006 he was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer by the
Association for Computing Machinery and in 2010 a
Fellow
A fellow is a concept whose exact meaning depends on context.
In learned or professional societies, it refers to a privileged member who is specially elected in recognition of their work and achievements.
Within the context of higher education ...
.
In 2007, he joined
IBM Research
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research or ...
, where he is currently a member of the Dynamic Optimization Group.
Ungar holds 20 US patents.
In 2006 the 1987 Self paper, coauthored by Ungar and Randall B. Smith, was selected as one of the three most influential
OOPSLA
OOPSLA (Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages & Applications) is an annual ACM research conference. OOPSLA mainly takes place in the United States, while the sister conference of OOPSLA, ECOOP, is typically held in Europe. It is opera ...
papers presented between 1986 and 1996.
Self was also one influence on the design of the
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
programming language. Ungar's 1984 paper, ''Generation Scavenging: A Non-disruptive High Performance Storage Reclamation Algorithm'', which introduced
generational garbage collection, won a Retrospective ACM
SIGSOFT
The Association for Computing Machinery's 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 en ...
Impact Paper Award in 2008.
Dave Ungar was awarded the
Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize in 2009.
Major publications
Extending Swift Value(s) to the Server David Ungar and Robert Dickerson, O'Reilly, 2016.
* ''The History of Self,'' David Ungar, Randall B. Smith. ACM HOPL-III, 2007. Proc. of the Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III), B. Ryder, B, Hailpern (Eds.), San Diego, California, USA, 9–10 June 2007. Paper and video a
* ''Reconciling Responsiveness with Performance in Pure Object-Oriented Languages,'' Urs Hölzle and David Ungar. TOPLAS 18, 4 (July 1996).
* ''Programming as an Experience: The Inspiration for Self,'' R. Smith & D. Ungar, invited paper, ECOOP’95.
Animation: From Cartoons to the User Interface Bay-Wei Chang and David Ungar, UIST 1993
Self: The Power of Simplicity Randall B. Smith and David Ungar, OOPSLA, October, 1987
Generation Scavenging: A non-disruptive high performance storage reclamation algorithm. David Ungar, 1984
Selected patents
* Perceptual-based color selection for text highlighting. (Jan. 11, 2005)
* Method and apparatus for increasing scavenging garbage collection effectiveness - (Jan 20, 2004)
* Method and apparatus for testing a process in a computer system - (Jul 15, 2003)
* Method and apparatus for finding bugs related to garbage collection in a virtual machine - (Dec 4, 2001)
* Method and apparatus of translating and executing native code in a virtual machine environment - (Aug 28, 2001)
* Method and apparatus for supporting efficient programming in dynamic pointer-safe languages - (Aug 21, 2001)
See also
*
Inline caching Inline caching is an optimization technique employed by some language runtimes, and first developed for Smalltalk.
The goal of inline caching is to speed up runtime method binding by remembering the results of a previous method lookup directly ...
References
External links
At IBM
At Sun
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Ungar, David
American computer programmers
American computer scientists
IBM employees
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
UC Berkeley College of Engineering alumni
Stanford University School of Engineering faculty
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Dahl–Nygaard Prize