Brad Cox has died

In the talk, Alan talks about the ant who lives his life on a single plane of existence, the "Gulley World" or "Reality".

The ant goes to work, he finds stuff to eat, he lives his life in this Gulley World, which is depicted as a pink 2D plane. However some times on this pink plane there are little spots of blue. They represent thoughts that don't belong in the pink plane.

Sometimes those blue spots turn into blue planes, and the ant we are following starts to move along that plane instead of the pink one. Everyone in the pink plane thinks he is wrong. Everyone can see the pink plane, in all its reality. It is not until you walk on the blue plane until you can see "another way".

The metaphor being that we developers built a world where we started to take the general idea of OOP and construct a lot of "reality" around it. A lot of process, a lot of formalization so we could build mechanical systems of gears that slotted together. I think Alan's idea of OOP was something more fluid, more organic than this. The world is messy and we often try to abstract the mess away in these overbearingly weighty and hierarchical programs that everyone agrees is the right way.

I think Objective-C was the most widely used and successful walk on this blue plane. Millions of developers were exposed to the idea of message passing as a form of OOP, which is an astounding accomplishment. It really is a neat language, and I had a lot of fun learning it.

Brad definitely walked on the blue plane. RIP.

Consider a function f that itself relies on being able to call function g. In FP, you have to either bind by name, which introduces coupling on par with OO ("the jungle"), or you make it parametric, so f doesn't know anything about g per se, but somebody does―perhaps f's caller, or its caller, etc. OO is parametric, too, but in that case they live as slots on the objects, rather than being passed as arguments.

People can try to squidge this end of the problem and find that it shquoshes up on the other side, or vice versa. There's no real escape from the problem of dealing with state.

Probably the real silver bullet boost to productivity will come when we adapt program execution environments to our dumb brains by way of VR. Think of something like a cellular automaton such as von Neumann's universal constructor:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...

... only in 3 dimensions. When we want to debug a program, we project it into a 3-dimensional space, and we trace its execution the way you can look at something progressing through the assembly line on a shop floor, with pieces that you can reach out and touch, and even pick them up and mark some with blue dots and some without, etc. That looks a lot more like OO than FP.

>"The late Steve Jobs', NeXT, licensed the Objective-C language for it's new operating system, NEXTSTEP. NeXT eventually acquired Objective-C from Stepstone."

Does anyone what NeXT paid to acquire the Objective-C license?