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Spot on. Objects were meant to be close to microservices, although with the limitation of being implemented in the same language. RPC was meant to allow objects

Spot on. Objects were meant to be close to microservices, although with the limitation of being implemented in the same language. RPC was meant to allow objects running on different hosts send messages to each other. That, before OOP turned into the ConfigurationParserSecureProviderCollectorGeneratorFactoryFactoryFactory disaster.

romaniv 9y ago
Interestingly, it seems RPC was one of those older ideas that was resurrected and replaced remote message passing when Smalltalk was phased out. Alan Kay on RPC: "The people who liked objects as non-data were smaller in number, and included myself, Carl Hewitt, Dave Reed and a few others – pretty much all of this group were from the ARPA community and were involved in one way or another with the design of ARPAnet->Internet in which the basic unit of computation was a whole computer. But just to show how stubbornly an idea can hang on, all through the seventies and eighties, there were many people who tried to get by with “Remote Procedure Call” instead of thinking about objects and messages. Sic transit gloria mundi." Source: http://mythz.servicestack.net/blog/2013/02/27/the-deep-insights-of-alan-kay/ http://mythz.servicestack.net/blog/2013/02/27/the-deep-insig...
cookiecaper 9y ago
>That, before OOP turned into the ConfigurationParserSecureProviderCollectorGeneratorFactoryFactoryFactory disaster. I think it's naive to design and implement something without the assumption that it will turn into such a disaster. The average skill level of the average person is much lower than anyone reading HN is going to assume. Instead of releasing pure, useful things that require good judgment to implement, we need to think very lowly of users and make something that is brutally difficult to break, destroy, or corrupt. It will still get broken, destroyed, and corrupted, but we need to build things under the assumption that virtually everyone is going to do it wrong, because they are. It would be fun to see a development environment designed under that principle, v. the academic "everyone is going to use this judiciously" paradigm that we see governing much of it. Maybe cloud computing and serverless functions is a prototype?
jjtheblunt 9y ago
Wasn't a realization of this what Craig Federighi worked on at NeXT? It's been decades since I was a NeXT Registered Developer but I think that existed then, built upon mach ports and a name service daemon the name of which escapes me.

romaniv 9y ago

Interestingly, it seems RPC was one of those older ideas that was resurrected and replaced remote message passing when Smalltalk was phased out. Alan Kay on RPC: "The people who liked objects as non-data were smaller in number, and included myself, Carl Hewitt, Dave Reed and a few others – pretty much all of this group were from the ARPA community and were involved in one way or another with the design of ARPAnet->Internet in which the basic unit of computation was a whole computer. But just to show how stubbornly an idea can hang on, all through the seventies and eighties, there were many people who tried to get by with “Remote Procedure Call” instead of thinking about objects and messages. Sic transit gloria mundi." Source: http://mythz.servicestack.net/blog/2013/02/27/the-deep-insights-of-alan-kay/ http://mythz.servicestack.net/blog/2013/02/27/the-deep-insig...

cookiecaper 9y ago

>That, before OOP turned into the ConfigurationParserSecureProviderCollectorGeneratorFactoryFactoryFactory disaster. I think it's naive to design and implement something without the assumption that it will turn into such a disaster. The average skill level of the average person is much lower than anyone reading HN is going to assume. Instead of releasing pure, useful things that require good judgment to implement, we need to think very lowly of users and make something that is brutally difficult to break, destroy, or corrupt. It will still get broken, destroyed, and corrupted, but we need to build things under the assumption that virtually everyone is going to do it wrong, because they are. It would be fun to see a development environment designed under that principle, v. the academic "everyone is going to use this judiciously" paradigm that we see governing much of it. Maybe cloud computing and serverless functions is a prototype?

jjtheblunt 9y ago

Wasn't a realization of this what Craig Federighi worked on at NeXT? It's been decades since I was a NeXT Registered Developer but I think that existed then, built upon mach ports and a name service daemon the name of which escapes me.