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by paolfs 32 days ago
I think the actor model comes closest to Kay's objects.

An object holds it's own state and might change that state based on messages it receives.

Today you can find this in, for example, Elixir and Microsoft Orleans.

2 comments

> I think the actor model comes closest to Kay's objects.

It's rather the other way round. There is no pre-Hewitt implemented semantics matching Kay's later 2001 claims; Smalltalk-72 was a synchronous token-stream interpreter rather than a system of independently active message-driven agents; FLEX shows processes, scheduling and quasi-parallel control, not objects, not messaging, not actor-style autonomous entities.

Actors are great, but it’s just making objects large enough so one thinks carefully before architecting a whole hierarchy of them to solve a simple problem.

As someone else said in this thread, OOP is fine for modularity, the problem is people don’t know how modular a problem should be and are driven to overcomplicate the design of any application.