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#alankay#smalltalk#oop

Seminar with Alan Kay on Object Oriented Programming (VPRI 0246)

Yoshiki Ohshima (大島芳樹)

1.7K subscribers • 3 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2019 to 2023.
  • Presented by Alan Kay, pioneer of object-oriented programming
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

31K views8 years ago2 recommendations

Software designHistory and cultureObject-oriented designSoftware architectureHistory of computing

Alan Kay discusses the original biological and system-level inspirations behind object-oriented programming, messaging, and the work at Xerox PARC.

Cannot tell when the talk was. Probably mid 80's.

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended for understanding the original vision of object-oriented programming directly from its pioneer.

gambleron Hacker News • Recommends

On “Correctness – A paradigm for sustainable software development”

Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: link If you want to see what "practical" OOP looked like in the 80s, this is a good video: link to this video
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patternson Hacker News • Recommends

On “Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)”

…ifficulties in finding and reusing components, weak generality) is being touched upon. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the critical ideas have been crystallized into a new kind of Smalltalk - which would be more focused on working on sets of components instead of individual objects/classes (or paraphrasing Alan Kay, making "tissues"). 1 link to this video…
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romanivon Hacker News • Mentions

On “A pattern language for microservices”

I'm watching some OOP videos from mid-eighties right now. Can't shake the feeling that the original notion of OOP was solving the same problems as microservices try to solve today, but with far more elegance and more coherent theoretical framework. (Example: link to this video )
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romanivon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018”

>Can we extend that logic to classes or interfaces? This was one of the main ideas behind the original definition of OOP. The original notion of "object" was very similar to our current notion of "service": link to this video Objects received messages, including messages sent over the network. There was not supposed to be a clear distinction between local and remote services - by design. A lot of inter-computer stuff could be/was handled transparently.
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gambleron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)”

Some of the ideas that were translated to reality are covered here: link to this video Some of them never got fully translated to reality at Xerox because of various reasons (e.g. memory limitation of hardware at the time). This is worth a read: link
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patternson Hacker News • Mentions

On “Synit – A Reactive Operating System”

That's interesting. Thanks for the paper. I skimmed through it, but I did not get every detail, since it's been a long time I worked with languages like ML or Haskell and my formal background is a bit rusty at the moment. I do like the premise that, if I understood correctly, (1) you want to specify your computations with the most suitable representation(s) and you want them to be inter-operable. Also, (2) I find it interesting how the tension between pattern matching on explicit representations and abstract data types with information hiding can be reconciled. On a less formal side, the Personal Information Environment done at Xerox PARC, extended Smalltalk with perspectives, which addresse…
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ly3xqhl8g9on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’”

An "everything app" is just an operating system. There is nothing to picture, we've been having them since the 1950s 1. We could imagine some new way of operating over systems: for instance the Alan Kay original meaning of object-orientedness 2, or instead of a compiled binary to have some stable diffusion model + large language model which hallucinates the OS on the go 3. But that's not what the quantifiably greediest person on the planet has in mind, by "everything app" they just mean "everything must be controlled by me, not by you". 1 link 2 link to this video 3 link
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andrekandreon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Alan Kay did not invent objects (2019)”

> His messages are directed to specific objects, whereas in a biological system, enzymes and the like are dumped into the bloodstream indiscriminately without a specific target. he actually goes into this in one of his (many) talks where he explains what some next steps might be for objects to "sense their environment" and message into the ether so-to-speak very similar to how you describe 0 0 link to this video (he starts talking about that around 12 mins)
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romanivon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Big Oops: Anatomy of a Thirty-Five-Year Mistake [video]”

This video contains many serious misrepresentations. For example, it makes a claim that Alan Kay only started talking about message-passing only in 2003 and that it was a kind of backpedaling due the failures of the inheritance-based OOP model. That is a laughable claim. Kay had given detailed talks discussing issues of OOP, dynamic composition and message-passing in mid-80s. Some of those talks are on YouTube: link to this video Also, earlier versions of Smalltalk did not have inheritance. Kay talks about this is his 1993 article on the history of the language: link Dismissing all of this as insignificant quips is ludicrous.
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