> Why didn't he call it Message Oriented Programming then? He eventually said much the same thing (many people remember him as using your exact phrase, but I'm

> Why didn't he call it Message Oriented Programming then? He eventually said much the same thing (many people remember him as using your exact phrase, but I'm less sure about that): > [Kay:] I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is "messaging"... [ Alan Kay, Usenet, 1998 ] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlanKayOnMessaging http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlanKayOnMessaging Somewhere I read him saying that a key moment was when he was looking at (IIRC) Sussman's highly optimized Lisp dispatch of continuations, and realized that it was essentially the same thing as what Kay had in mind for Smalltalk. Something roughly like that. It may have been the first "X is a poor man's Y" observation.