Blaine Buxton: Positronic Vibrations From Alto Dorado

Gleamed From The Squeak List

Alan Kay made the following post on the Squeak List and it points to a lot of stuff that I need to look at. The amount of history in this man's head is amazing. Anyway, I thought I'd share:

--- Alan Kay wrote:
> Hint: as I mentioned previously, you don't need a
> method dictionary,
> classes, inheritance, etc. You don't even need
> "state" in the way it
> is usually thought of. The essence is that of
> communicating computers
> as looked at from the outside. If you can make the
> insides look like
> the outsides "all the way down" then you have
> something very
> interesting and powerful.
>
> And yes, the original theory of Smalltalk was just
> this (since even
> the syntaxes used are definable by interior actions
> of how the
> "computers" recognize and receive messages). The
> interesting and
> difficult parts here are design decisions about
> architectural
> conventions that allow the universal mechanisms to
> be used with
> minimal pain and maximum expression and scalability
> by humans.
>
> Each of the 4 Smalltalks in the 70s made different
> choices (plus the
> PIE system of Goldstein & Bobrow), and it's a pity
> that there have
> been so few experiments since Smalltalk-80 came out
> of PARC.
>
> But check out some of Mark Lentzner's stuff:
> Codeworks, Wheat, etc.
> Look at Joe Goguen's ideas about closer analogies to
> algebras as the
> interface, etc. Ken Kahn's various designs over the
> years are
> extremely interesting. Several of the designs I did
> after leaving
> PARC -- Rainbow, and the original Playground (quite
> different from
> each other and I'm not sure where either set of
> papers is anymore) --
> still seem to be interesting to me. David Reed's
> NAMOS is the basis
> of Croquet. And, of course, Andreas Raab's not too
> far away Tweak
> design is a *really interesting* set of ideas....
>
> However, there have been many interesting ideas over
> the years that
> have had little effect because they lacked enough
> pragmatic reality
> via great implementations (and certainly vice versa:
> an incredible
> number of systems used today have weak ideas but
> were implemented
> well enough to spread).
>
> Cheers,
>
> Alan
>

posted by Blaine at 5:56 PM |