←back to thread

Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 1 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | 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).
Show context
Adam-Kadmon ◴[20 Jun 16 18:59 UTC] No.11940379[source]▶
What is the best language to learn OOP concepts ?
replies(1): >>11946410 #
alankay1 ◴[21 Jun 16 15:30 UTC] No.11946410[source]▶
Good question. If we are talking "real OOP", I'm not sure these days. What do other people think?

Smalltalk is very long in the tooth these days, but it is still "rather object-oriented in good ways".

Erlang and its derivatives are fun and good to help that kind of thinking.

replies(2): >>11947670 #>>11949486 #
npm83 ◴[21 Jun 16 17:41 UTC] No.11947670[source]▶
What do you think is missing from Smalltalk, and what would you expect for the "21th century Smalltalk" if there was such think?

Even though is "old", I find it extremely valuable for learning to think and reason in a pure OO fashion.

replies(1): >>11948686 #
alankay1 ◴[21 Jun 16 19:27 UTC] No.11948686[source]▶
It's worth thinking about what scales and what doesn't scale so well. For example, names are relatively local conventions. We could expect to have to find better ways to describe resources, or perhaps "send processes rather than messages". Think about what's really interesting about the way Parc used what became Postscript instead of trying to define a file format for "documents" for printers ... (a programming language can have far few conventions and be more powerful, so ...)
replies(3): >>11949633 #>>11949758 #>>11951418 #
1. mmiller ◴[22 Jun 16 03:44 UTC] No.11951418[source]▶
Re. consider "send processes rather than messages"

Interesting thought to ponder!... What came to mind is Smalltalk-80 kind of did that, though the processes (blocks) were not in the "driver's seat" of the interaction. They came as "payload."