5 ms·

Just to add to the previous poster's comments, Alan Kay seems to also consider the internal state of a "cell" (or object) to be private and responsive only to e

Just to add to the previous poster's comments, Alan Kay seems to also consider the internal state of a "cell" (or object) to be private and responsive only to external messaging. If you extrapolate this to a network I personally see a "colony" of objects that are not "aware" of each other aside from their neighbours' messages, and the whole thing starts to seem like it has a lot of the features we see in modern functional programming today. I don't think this is particularly coincidental, since functional approaches are born from lambda calculus and Kay mentions in these emails a desire to incorporate algebras into his objects (aside from the biological nature of this type of cell communication). Alan, if you're in the comments section I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think of the resurgence of functional programming in the modern day and whether anything, other than perhaps languages like Erlang, has approached your original ideal.

macintux 8y ago
I don't think I've watched it previously, and I don't have the time to now, but I have to imagine Joe Armstrong interviewing Alan Kay would at least touch on that (although from one comment it sounds like they didn't do more than that). https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY
- jimbokun 8y ago
  Watch it! I just watched the whole thing, based on just seeing your link. It does talk about the historical connections between Smalltalk and Erlang, but goes far beyond that to remind us to think more about the bigger problems we need to solve, and get less caught up in doing things just because we have a tool that can do them or other people are doing things that way. I found it truly inspiring.
rudedogg 8y ago
> Alan, if you're in the comments section I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think of the resurgence of functional programming in the modern day and whether anything, other than perhaps languages like Erlang, has approached your original ideal Someone asked a similar question when he did an AMA, but the answer wasn't clear to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940211

macintux 8y ago

I don't think I've watched it previously, and I don't have the time to now, but I have to imagine Joe Armstrong interviewing Alan Kay would at least touch on that (although from one comment it sounds like they didn't do more than that). https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY

jimbokun 8y ago
Watch it! I just watched the whole thing, based on just seeing your link. It does talk about the historical connections between Smalltalk and Erlang, but goes far beyond that to remind us to think more about the bigger problems we need to solve, and get less caught up in doing things just because we have a tool that can do them or other people are doing things that way. I found it truly inspiring.

rudedogg 8y ago

> Alan, if you're in the comments section I'd love to hear your thoughts on what you think of the resurgence of functional programming in the modern day and whether anything, other than perhaps languages like Erlang, has approached your original ideal Someone asked a similar question when he did an AMA, but the answer wasn't clear to me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940211