Has [1] been mentioned yet? If so, apologies. I think many here are implicitly referencing this when bringing up Oberon.
[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HeInventedTheTerm On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Alan Kay <[email protected]> wrote: > The Flex Machine was "the omelet you have to throw away to clean the pan", > so I haven't put any effort into saving that history. But there were "4 or > 5" pretty good things and "4 or 5" really bad things that helped the > Alto-Smalltalk effort a few years later. I'd say that the huge factors after > having tried to do one of these were two geniuses: Chuck Thacker (who was an > infinitely better hardware designer and builder than I was), and Dan Ingalls > (who was infinitely better at most phases of software design and > implementation than I was). > > Cheers, > > Alan > > ------------------------------ > *From:* Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <[email protected]> > *To:* Alan Kay <[email protected]>; Fundamentals of New Computing < > [email protected]> > *Sent:* Wednesday, August 31, 2011 3:09 PM > *Subject:* Re: [fonc] Re: Ceres and Oberon > > Alan, > > thanks for the detailed history! > > > 1966 was the year I entered grad school (having programmed for 4-5 years, > > but essentially knowing nothing about computer science). Shortly after > > encounters with and lightning bolts from the sky induced by Sketchpad and > > Simula, I found the Euler papers and thought you could make something > with > > "objects" that would be nicer if you used Euler for a basis rather than > how > > Simula was built on Algol. That turned out to be the case and I built > this into > > the table-top plus display plus pointing device personal computer Ed > Cheadle > > and I made over the next few years. > > Is this available anywhere beyond the small fragments at > > http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay68.html > > and > > http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay69.html > > ? > > Though you often mention the machine itself, I have never seen you put > these texts in the list of what people should read like you do with > Ivan's thesis. > > > The last time I looked at Oberon (at Apple more than 15 years ago) it did > > not impress, and did not resemble anything I would call an > object-oriented > > language -- or an advance on anything that was already done in the 70s. > > But that's just my opinion. And perhaps it has improved since then. > > It was an attempt to step back from the complexity of Modula-2, which is > a good thing. It has the FONC goal of being small enough to be > completely read and understood by one person (he does mention that this > is in the form of a 600 page book in the talk). > > In the early 1990s I was trying to build a really low cost computer > around the Self language and a professor who always had interesting > insights suggested that something done with Oberon would require fewer > hardware resources. I studied the language and saw that they had > recently made it object oriented: > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon-2_%28programming_language%29 > > But it turned out that this was a dead end and the then current system > was built with the original, non object oriented version of the language > (as it is to this day - the OO programming Wirth mentioned in the talk > is the kind of thing you can do in plain C). I liked the size of the > system, but the ALL CAPS code hurt my eyes and the user interface was > awkward (both demonstrators in the movie had problems using it, though > Wirth had the excuse that he hadn't used it in a long time). > > -- Jecel > > > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > >
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