Hi Alan,
Is it fair to say that the path you took with Smalltalk led to today's
object model of data structures, associated methods, and inheritance,
with either a single thread-of-control, or small numbers of threads;
while the Actor model led (perhaps not directly) to massive concurrency
and Erlang? (I'm still waiting for something that looks like Smalltalk
meets Erlang.)
Cheers,
Miles
Alan Kay wrote:
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 <[email protected]>
*To:* Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]>
*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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--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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