Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

>but I observe that Smalltalk is what he in fact created as the manifestation of his ideas

Actually no. Dan Ingalls made Smalltalk-80, which is probably the one you know. Kay never liked ST-80, but I'm not convinced Kay ever had a clear vision of what OO should be, only what it shouldn't. He knows enough to say he doesn't like anything that's available but why hasn't he just made a manifestation of his ideas? It's much easier to deal with "no, not like that, like this" then someone who just constantly says "no, that's not it either".

There were several previous versions of Smalltalk. Maybe he actually did make some of those. But they were dropped because they weren't powerful enough...




He has. This post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4789877 has more details.

But I think it was clear before this. Message-passing between non-shared state actors is a fundamentally different animal than "traditional" shared-state programing, whereas what is commonly thought of as OOP (special method-call syntax, class-based coding) is just sugar on any other language without changing the way things work under the hood.

Certainly, using the word "object" was unfortunate because it distracted people whereas "message-passing" is more to the point, but if you see what it was supposed to achieve there really is only one thing it could mean.




Consider applying for YC's W25 batch! Applications are open till Nov 12.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: