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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 1 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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).
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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 #
1. 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.