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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 2 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.506s | source

This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
1. arloc ◴[21 Jun 16 14:48 UTC] No.11945986[source]▶
Hi Alan,

Can you confirm that a message is a declarative information sent to a recipient which can (or can not) react to it? And what is your opinion about inheritance in OOP? Is it absolutely essential feature in an OOP language?

replies(1): >>11954052 #
2. alankay1 ◴[22 Jun 16 14:11 UTC] No.11954052[source]▶
I like "messages" as "non-command" things. And I left out inheritance in the first Smalltalk because I didn't think Simula's version was semantic enough (and still don't).

The idea of a "generalization" from which you can get instances is good. Now the question -- then and now -- is how can you define the "generalization". We didn't do it well back then, and I don't know of a system that does this well enough today.