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Are there any examples of Kay's ideal other than The Internet? Especially systems that I could actually inspect and learn about in detail, rather than read short stories about.
I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages (so messaging came at the very beginning -- it took a while to see how to do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful).
How is messaging different than calling a method?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957001
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Squeak[1]/Smalltalk? (i.e. have you worked with what he would consider a 'real' message-oriented OO language?) [1] http://squeak.org/downloads/
I played around with Squeak many years ago, but might appreciate it more now. What recently spurred more confusion on this topic was Alan Kay's discussion with Rich Hickey during the AMA the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722 I found it really hard to understand what Alan Kay is actually talking about. Saying things like > This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can n…
But don't let this discourage you from looking into Squeak. I played around with Squeak in the 90's but couldn't see past things like the weird mouse button mappings and color scheme. Fortunately I came back to it again and found some of the glaring UI issues (by modern standards) had been smoothed over. It also probably didn't hurt that I was a little older and better able to stick with it until I could finally see better the second go at it what the original vision was. Also, there is the work from his STEPS project which used Squeak as a platform that was used to prototype some of the next-generation ideas he talks about.
If you want to understand better the next generation concepts, definitely look at the VPRI writings (esp. the STEPS annual reports) linked to in a previous post. To bridge the gap from here to there (i.e. to get to a tangible system that you can actually use that does any of this) I think you're probably going to want to learn Smalltalk as a starting point.
For example, AP Computer Science requires Java and tries to teach stuff like designing inheritance hierarchies to people in their first two months of programming education. And then tests it mostly using multiple-choice quizzes. It's totally inappropriate - most of these students would fail fizzbuzz.
OOP should be something you only get into after you have written some practical programs, rather than something where you can't program, but you memorize the difference between "is-a" and "has-a" inheritance so that you can pass multiple choice tests.
How is messaging different than calling a method?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Squeak[1]/Smalltalk? (i.e. have you worked with what he would consider a 'real' message-oriented OO language?) [1] http://squeak.org/downloads/
I played around with Squeak many years ago, but might appreciate it more now. What recently spurred more confusion on this topic was Alan Kay's discussion with Rich Hickey during the AMA the other day. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722 I found it really hard to understand what Alan Kay is actually talking about. Saying things like > This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can n…
* Publish a PJEG spec
* Define a .pjeg extension and let everyone know that means it's
a PJEG file
* Write a PJEG encoder/viewer for each kind of computer
* Distribute these programs to the computers
* Configure the computers to open .pjeg files using the programs
you distributed
* Modify other programs (image editors, web browsers) so they
can recognize, encode and view PJEG files as well
* etc...
* Include an interpretable PJEG encoder/viewer with every PJEG file
* The larger file size can be mitigated by format negotiation
(if I already know about the format, you don't have to tell
me about it)
* Optimized encoders and decoders can be written to replace the
slower interpreted ones included with the file
How is messaging different than calling a method?
Alan commented on this several times in the AMA he did here a couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11957001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945123
IMO the problem with object-oriented programming is that it turned into the standard curriculum for peoples' first semester of computer science, rather than being yet another interesting concept that advanced programmers would ponder. And the way we handle "the standard CS curriculum" sucks. (In the USA at least.) For example, AP Computer Science requires Java and tries to teach stuff like designing inheritance hiera…
How is messaging different than calling a method?
Messaging works perfectly well in a composition-over-inheritance setting. See also: Erlang.
Are there any examples of Kay's ideal other than The Internet? Especially systems that I could actually inspect and learn about in detail, rather than read short stories about.