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Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)

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Re: Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)

#4

Post by blihp »

mej10 wrote: post #3

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.

Squeak[1]/Smalltalk? (i.e. have you worked with what he would consider a 'real' message-oriented OO language?)

[1] http://squeak.org/downloads/

Re: Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)

#5

Post by minskyway »

mej10 wrote: post #3

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.

Writings: http://vpri.org/html/writings.php

Software: http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Re: Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)

#7

Post by mej10 »

blihp wrote: post #4
mej10 wrote: post #3

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.

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 negotiate with other objects they've never seen.

This seems like something that (based on my limited knowledge) isn't possible with Smalltalk (in any but the most trivial of cases), and so I don't really consider it an example of what he is talking about. Or, at least, all of the things that I know of that you can do with this you could just as easily implement in languages without the same dynamism as Smalltalk.

My conclusion after reading all of that is that Kay is talking about a system so completely unlike anything we have that there aren't even really examples of what it would look like.

I am really trying to understand what Kay is talking about, so any pointers would be interesting!

Re: Alan Kay on the misunderstanding of OOP (1998)

#9

Post by z1mm32m4n »

mej10 wrote: post #3

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.

Hearing the way Alan Kay talks about "messaging" always reminds me of two technologies: the Flux/Redux architecture and Apache Samza & Kafka.

> The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be.

With React and Flux, this is exactly what's going on! You're defining view components, and when someone interacts with them, there's a very structured, discrete set of actions that can be fired. These actions are then dispatched and handled elsewhere, but somewhere at the core, there's a single source of truth for what happens upon any given message.

And for Apache Samza, I think this video[1] does a nice job of talking about stream processing as a programming architecture. There's a connection to be made between processing streams of information and processing messages between modules, and that video goes a good way towards exposing it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU9hR3kiOK0 "Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza"

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