Hi Miles
(Again "The Early History of Smalltalk" has some of this history ...)
It is unfair to Carl Hewitt to say that "Actors were his reaction to
Smalltalk-72" (because he had been thinking early thoughts from other
influences). And I had been doing a lot of thinking about the import of his
"Planner" language.
But that is the simplest way of stating the facts and the ordering.
ST-72 and the early Actors follow on were very similar. The Smalltalk that
didn't get made, "-71", was a kind of merge of the object idea, Logo, and
Carl's Planner system (which predated Prolog and was in many respects more
powerful). Planner used "pattern-directed invocation" and I thought you could
both receive messages with it if it were made the interface of an object, and
also use it for deduction. Smalltalk-72 was a bit of an accident....
The divergence later was that we got a bit dirtier as we made a real system
that you could program a real system in. Actors got cleaner as they looked at
many interesting theoretical possibilities for distributed computing etc. My
notion of "object oriented" would now seem to be very actor-like.
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
> From: Miles Fidelman <mfidel...@meetinghouse.net>
>To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
>Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 11:05 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Terminology: "Object Oriented" vs "Message Oriented"
>
>Alan Kay wrote:
>> A little more history ...
>>
>> The first Smalltalk (-72) was "modern" (as used below), and similar to
>> Erlang in several ways -- for example, messages were received with
>> "structure and pattern matching", etc. The language was extended using the
>> same mechanisms ...
>
>Alan,
>
>As I recall, some of your early writings on Smalltalk sounded very actor-like
>- i.e., objects as processes, with lots of messages floating around, rather
>than a sequential thread-of-control model. Or is my memory just getting fuzzy?
> In any case, I'm surprised that the term "actor" hasn't popped up in this
>thread, along with "object" and "messaging."
>
>Miles Fidelman
>
>
>
>-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
>In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
>
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