Could not resist the pun iTypos expected from iPhone; please forgive
Mobile: 6127434923 On Feb 12, 2013, at 8:50, "Brown, John Mickey" <john.mick.br...@disney.com> wrote: > Dude…. You said shiny "objects"…. Lol. > > Messaging certainly seems to have a larger focus with multi-core, many-core, > and cloud computing concepts (that itself is morphing into shiny objects). > I also enjoy these history lessons and discussions. > > John > > From: David Hussman <david.huss...@devjam.com> > Reply-To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org> > Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2013 11:36:35 -0500 > To: 'Alan Kay' <alan.n...@yahoo.com>, 'Fundamentals of New Computing' > <fonc@vpri.org> > Subject: Re: [fonc] Terminology: "Object Oriented" vs "Message Oriented" > > Alan, > > Thanks for the thoughtful words / history. I am a lurker on this group and I > dig seeing this kind of dialog during times when I am so often surrounded by > bright shiny object types. > > David > > From: fonc-boun...@vpri.org [mailto:fonc-boun...@vpri.org] On Behalf Of Alan > Kay > Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 10:23 AM > To: Fundamentals of New Computing > Subject: Re: [fonc] Terminology: "Object Oriented" vs "Message Oriented" > > Hi Loup > > I think how this happened has already been described in "The Early History of > Smalltalk". > > But .... > > In the Fall of 1966, Sketchpad was what got me started thinking about > "representing concepts as whole things". Simula, a week later, provided a > glimpse of how one could "deal with issues that couldn't be done wonderfully > with constraints and solving" (namely, you could hide procedures inside the > entities). > > This triggered off many thoughts in a few minutes, bringing in "ideas that > seemed similar" from biology, math (algebras), logic (Carnap's intensional > logic), philosophy (Plato's "Ideas"), hardware (running multiple active units > off a bus), systems design (the use of virtual machines in time-sharing), and > networking (the ARPA community was getting ready to do the ARPAnet). Bob > Barton had pronounced that "recursive design is making the parts have the > same powers as the wholes", which for the first time I was able to see was > really powerful if the wholes and the parts were entire computers hardware or > software or some mixture. > > The latter was hugely important to me because it allowed a "universal > simulation system" to be created from just a few ideas that would cover > everything and every other kind of thing. > > During this period I had no label for what I was doing, including "this thing > I was doing", I was just doing. > > A few months later someone asked me what I was doing, and I didn't think > about the answer -- I was still trying to see how the synthesis of ideas > could be pulled off without a lot of machinery (kind of the math stage of the > process). > > Back then, there was already a term in use called "data driven programming". > This is where "data" contains info that will help find appropriate > procedures. > > And the term "objects" was also used for "composite data" i.e. blocks of > storage with different fields containing values of various kinds. This came > naturally from "card images" (punched cards were usually 80 or more > characters long and divided into fields). > > At some point someone (probably in the 50s) decided to use some of the fields > to help the logic of plug board programming and "drive" the processes off the > cards rather than "just processing" them. > > So if you looked at how Sketchpad was implemented you would see, in the terms > of the day: "objects that were data driven". Ivan gives Doug Ross credit for > his "plex structures", which were an MIT way to think about these ideas. > Sketchpad also used "threaded lists" in its blocks (this was not a great idea > but it was popular back then -- Simula later took this up as well). > > So I just said "object oriented programming" and went back to work. > > Later I regretted this (and some of the other labels that were also put in > service) after the ideas worked out nicely and were very powerful for us at > PARC. > > The success of the ideas made what we were doing popular, and people wanted > to be a part of it. This led to using the term "object oriented" as a > designer jeans label for pretty much anything (there was even an > "object-oriented" COBOL!). This appropriation of labels without content is a > typical pop culture "fantasy football" syndrome. > > PARC was an integral part of the ARPA community, the last gasp of which in > the 70s was designing the Internet via a design group that contained PARC > people (PARC had actually already done an "internetwork" -- called PUP -- > with "gateways" (routers) to interconnect Ethernetworks and other networks > within Xerox). > > It was clear to all in this community from the mid-60s onward that how > "messaging" was done was one of the keys to achieving scaling. This is why > "what I was working on" had "messages" as the larger coordination idea > (rather than the subset of "calls"). > > At PARC we wanted to do a complete personal computing system on the Alto, > which was a microcoded ~150ns cycle CPU with 16 program counters and 64k > 16bit words of memory that cycled at ~750ns (where half of this memory was > used for the bit-map of the display). The next level memory was not a > swapping disk but a slower removable disk with about 2.5MBytes capacity. > > The good news was that the Alto was fast enough to run Smalltalk byte codes > and bitblt, etc. to allow executables to be small and powerful. The bad news > was that it wasn't quite fast enough to do real messaging. The good news was > that Smalltalk was powerful expressively, and this allowed the whole size of > the system including "OS", language, apps, UI, etc., to be tiny (about 10K > lines of program code initially). This allowed us to pretend we had messaging > but to actually do procedure calls under the covers and get away with it (one > of the ideas was to not manifest a "message" unless someone wanted to see it > -- this was part of the magic of Dan Ingalls' design). > > So I think the problem with "messaging" was partly that it was the more > subtle and invisible idea and this "verb part") got lost because the > representational "noun part" got all the attention. (And we generally don't > think of noun-like things as "in process".) This is part of the big problem > in "OOP" today, because it is mostly a complicated way of making new data > structures whose fields are munged by "setters". > > Back to your original question, it *might* have helped to have better > terminology. The Simula folks tried this in the first Simula, but their > choice of English words was confusing (they used "Activity" for "Class" and > "Process" for "Instance"). This is almost good and much more in keeping with > what should be the philosophical underpinnings of this kind of design. > > After being told that no one had understood this (I and two other grad > students had to read the machine code listing of the Simula compiler to > understand its documentation!), the Nygaard and Dahl chose "Class" and > "Instance" for Simula 67. I chose these for Smalltalk also because why > multiply terms? (I should have chosen better terms here also.) > > To sum up, besides the tiny computers we had to use back then, we didn't have > a good enough theory of messaging -- we did have a start that was based on > Dave Fisher's "Control Definition Language" CMU 1970 thesis. But then we got > overwhelmed by the excitement of being able to make personal computing on the > Alto. A few years later I decided that "sending messages" was not a good > scaling idea, and that something more general to get needed resources "from > the outside" needed to be invented. > > Cheers, > > Alan > > From: Loup Vaillant <l...@loup-vaillant.fr> > To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org> > Sent: Tuesday, February 12, 2013 7:15 AM > Subject: [fonc] Terminology: "Object Oriented" vs "Message Oriented" > > This question was prompted by a quote by Joe Armstrong about OOP[1]. > It is for Alan Kay, but I'm totally fine with a relevant link. Also, > "I don't know" and "I don't have time for this" are perfectly okay. > > Alan, when the term "Object oriented" you coined has been hijacked by > Java and Co, you made clear that you were mainly about messages, not > classes. My model of you even says that Erlang is far more OO than Java. > > Then why did you chose the term "object" instead of "message" in the > first place? Was there a specific reason for your preference, or did > you simply not bother foreseeing any terminology issue? (20/20 hindsight and > such.) > > Bonus question: if you had choose "message" instead, do you think it > would have been hijacked too? > > Thanks, > Loup. > > > [1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5205976 > (This is for reference, you don't really need to read it.) > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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