The Dahl–Nygaard Prize is awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential.
The senior prize is recognized as one of the most prestigious prizes in the area of software engineering,[citation needed] though it is a relatively new prize.
The winners of both awards are announced at the European Conference on Object Oriented Programming (ECOOP).
The prizes are named after Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, two Norwegian pioneers in the area of programming and simulation.
The prize was created by the Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets (AITO) in 2004.