Alan Kay wrote:

> I'm glad that he has finally come to appreciate OOP.

There are two kinds of people on this list. Those who can tell when Alan
is joking and those that can't. :-D

Don't know which I am but I can at least say that the OOP that is in
Oberon is not what Alan had in mind when he invented the term.

Sorry if you were being sincere Alan... :-)

At any rate, I do appreciate the Oberon system and the evolution of
Wirth's language through Pascal, Modula-2, and Oberon. *Somebody* had to
do the experiment that is: take a classical systems programming
language, and implement a small, understandable, system and environment
in that one language. I think the Oberon system is more or less what you
get when you take a C-like language and "play it grand" on a
workstation.

As an aside, I think it's crazy that C hasn't at least grown a module
system yet.

Changing the subject a bit...

We can all look to the past for great OS and language designs; each of
us knows a few. However, I'm not so sure about the network aspects and
the approaches to distributed computing. Can we look to the past for
inspiring distributed computing environments? Or are the truly great and
timeless ones yet to be invented? I guess we'll have to nail down and
agree upon a decent node first.

Ed


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