[alankay]

I didn't coin the term "object" -- and I shouldn't have used it in 1966 when I did coin the term "object-oriented programming" flippantly in response to the question "what are you working on?".

This is partly because the term at the time meant a patch of storage with multiple data fields -- like a punched card image in storage or a Sketchpad data-structure.

But my idea was about "things" that were like time-sharing processes, but for all entities. This was a simple idea that was catalyzed by seeing Sketchpad and Simula I in the same week in grad school.

The work we did at Parc after doing lots of software engineering to get everything to be "an object", was early, quite successful, and we called it "object-oriented programming".

I think this led to people in the 1980s wanting to be part of this in some way, and the term was applied in ways that weren't in my idea of "everything from software computers on a network intercommunicating by messages".

I don't think the term can be rescued at this point -- and I've quit using it to describe how we went about doing things.

It's worth trying to understand the difference between the idea, our pragmatic experiments on small machines at Xerox Parc, and what is called "OOP" today.

The simplest way to understand what we were driving at "way back then" was that we were trying to move from "programming" as it was thought of in the 60s -- where programs manipulated data structures -- to "growing systems" -- like Smalltalk and the Internet -- where the system would "stay alive" and help to move itself forward in time. (And so forth.)

The simplest way to think about this is that one way to characterize systems is that which is "made from intercommunicating dynamic modules". In order to make this work, one has to learn how to design and maintain systems ...

[crdrost]

Oh wow.

I was really not expecting you to join this conversation and I am very thankful to have crossed paths with you, even so briefly. Sorry for getting you wrong about the “objects” vs. “OOP” thing.

I have thought you could maybe call it “node-oriented” or “thread-oriented” but after reading this comment I think “ecosystem-oriented” might be more faithful a term?

[revvx]

Alan suggested "server-oriented programming" in Quora:

https://www.quora.com/What-is-Alan-Kays-definition-of-Object...

[davidrupp]

I think the inspiration from Simula I is something a lot of folks either don't know about, or maybe they know about it but don't recognize its significance. Objects with encapsulated state that respond to well-defined messages are a useful level of abstraction for writing simulations of the sort Simula was built for. They're just not automatically a particularly wieldy abstraction for systems that aren't specifically about simulation. Some (most?) of that is about the skill of the programmer, imo, not some inherent flaw in the abstraction itself.

P.S.: Thank you for all your contributions to our profession, and for your measured response to these kinds of discussions.

[alankay]

It's out of the context of this thread, but we were quite sure that "simulation-style" systems design would be a much more powerful and comprehensive way to create most things on a computer, and most especially for personal computers.

At Parc, I think we were able to make our point. Around 2014 or so we brought back to life the NoteTaker Smalltalk from 1978, and I used it to make my visual material for a tribute to Ted Nelson. See what you think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw&t=135s

This system --including everything -- "OS", SDK, Media, GUI, Tools, and the content -- is about 10,000 lines of Smalltalk-78 code sitting on top of about 6K bytes of machine code (the latter was emulated to get the whole system going).

I think what happened is that the early styles of programming, especially "data structures, procedures, imperative munging, etc." were clung to, in part because this was what was taught, and the more design-intensive but also more compact styles developed at Parc seemed very foreign. So when C++, Java, etc. came along the old styles were retained, and classes were relegated to creating abstract data types with getters and setters that could be munged from the outside.

Note that this is also "simulation style programming" but simulating data structures is a very weak approach to design for power and scaling.

I think the idea that all entities could be protected processes (and protected in both directions) that could be used as communicating modules for building systems got both missed and rejected.

Of course, much more can and should be done today more than 40 years after Parc. Massive scaling of every kind of resource requires even stronger systems designs, especially with regard to how resources can be found and offered.

[hannofcart]

Are you the Alan Kay. Is there any way we can verify this is you? The HN user account seems to have a very low "karma" rating, so one can't help but be more suspicious.

[alankay]

I'm the "computing Alan Kay" from the ARPA/Parc research community (there's a clarinettist, a judge, a wrestler, etc.) I did create a new account for these replies (I used my old ARPA login name).

[hannofcart]

It's really cool that you weigh in on discussions on HN. Or I suppose it feels like that to me primarily because I grew up reading your quotes in info text boxes in programming texts. And it's cool to have that person responding to comments.

[filoeleven]

It’s a new account created yesterday. Alan Kay did an AMA here a while back+ with the username “alankay1” and occasionally posted elsewhere. That account’s last post was 7 months ago. Given that user “Alan-1”s style and content is similar, it seems likely that he created a new account after half a year away from HN.

If you want verification, maybe you can convince him to do another AMA =) I’m still thinking about his more cryptic answers from the last one, which is well worth a read. I think that was before Dynamicland existed, but I may be off.

+ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11939851