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At the risk of coming off as snarky toward Alan Kay, whom I respect tremendously, I believe the Kay-official answer to the question "what is Kay oop?" is "you j
by shrimpx 8y ago
At the risk of coming off as snarky toward Alan Kay, whom I respect tremendously, I believe the Kay-official answer to the question "what is Kay oop?" is "you just don't get it." Which for me has always raised a flag. We all know how to call methods, exchange messages, and raise and subscribe to events, yet there is always the implication that we haven't yet understood the real meaning of Kay oop, as if there's some gold nugget of knowledge yet to be gleaned. Pretty sure there's no nugget.
- _pmf_ 8y agoI think the "you don't get it" refers to the knee jerk reaction of trying to map methods to messages.
- schwurb 8y ago> I believe the Kay-official answer to the question "what is Kay oop?" is "you just don't get it." Which for me has always raised a flag. There are at least two problems at work here: 1. The words that Alan Key is (rightly) using are overloaded, since other languages adopted the OO term, but interpreted them differently. This adds to miscommunication: The words sound familiar, but their meaning might be subtly or drastically different. 2. The advantages of OO as thought by Alan Key are hard to convey if not by hands-on experience. Debugging and developing programs in Smalltalk is really fun and effective, but I had to write my thesis in a Smalltalk company first to appreciate it. This is an instance of the "blob problem" as termed by Paul Graham. Many Non-Lispers have a hard time appreciating the benefits of powerful metaprogramming, and reading articles about it won't change that. They might peak interest, but one has to play around some time with those concepts to gain a feel for what benefits and limits are.
- SignsOfABeast 8y agos/blob/blub/