5 ms·

Didn’t Alan Kay coin the term “object oriented”?

by skndr 7y ago

hota_mazi 7y ago
That's what he claims but there's zero evidence besides his own word.
- lliamander 7y ago
  Well, how large is the pool of other possible candidates? Wouldn't someone from that time period (say the Simula folks, or another PARC employee) challenge that assertion? Why would he like?
- DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
  Ah, so you have evidence that it was somebody else?
  - hota_mazi 7y ago
    I don't, but that's not how the burden of proof works.
    - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
      Every source I've ever come across on this topic (and I work in PL research) points to Kay as the originator of the term "object-oriented" in relation to programming. No exceptions. You are now making an affirmative assertion that Alan Kay did not coin the term. The burden of proof is on you, not him.
      - hota_mazi 7y ago
        Link these sources, then! Even someone who recently interviewed him and researched the subject for months confessed he could never corroborate that claim. You make the claim he coined the term, the burden of proof is on you. Until you do, it's perfectly reasonable and intellectually honest to reject that claim.
        DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
        Sure, it's impossible to corroborate at this point because there's no direct evidence of it. It's not like he wrote it in a mailing list that we still have access to. It was (according to what I've read about it) a verbal statement made in response to a question asked of him by someone else. I don't know who the other person is, though perhaps that would be a place to look. References I've seen have, of course, essentially all pointed back to Kay's claims. I imagine this is insufficient in your eyes, so I won't bother finding them for you. Arguing "it's reasonable and intellectually honest to reject [the claim that Kay coined the term]" is silly. It's not reasonable, because there's no real reason to suspect the claim to be false in the first place. For 50+ years it has been accepted knowledge that Kay coined the term. Nobody — including people with direct experience on the same teams or with otherwise opposing claims — has stepped forward to dispute this fact in all that time. This would be just like saying "Well I don't think da Vinci really made the Mona Lisa. I mean, all we have is his word for it. Sure, the painting didn't exist before him, and its existence appears to have started with him, and people at the time attribute its existence to him, but for all we know maybe somebody else did it and gave it to him to use as his own!" Sure, it's possible... but it's a silly claim to make (and hence not reasonable). Your position is not "intellectually honest" because it sincerely looks like you're just trying to be antagonistic. What's the point in arguing that Kay didn't coin the term? Do you have some unsung hero in mind you'd like to promote as the coiner? Or do you just like arguing against commonly-held beliefs for the sake of it? I don't see what you're trying to accomplish. Two more thoughts: 1. The only way to prove Kay didn't originally coin the term would be to find hard evidence of it used in a similar fashion (i.e., with regard to programming) from prior to 1966 (the time Kay claims he invented the term). 2. If you had such evidence, you would need to prove that Kay had seen it prior to his alleged coinage. In the absence of such proof, the existence of the term prior to Kay's use would be irrelevant. Why? Because the community as a whole has gone off of Kay's claim for the whole time. If somebody else conceived of "object-oriented programming", we didn't get it from them — we got it from Kay.
    - IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
      Alan Kay responded above so...
      - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
        Link at [0]. I'm a little skeptical. That user certainly writes in a similar style to how I've seen Alan Kay write online, but I wouldn't be opposed to seeing some more proof. A one-day-old HN account claiming to belong to one of the most important people in CS from the past 50 years seems a little suspicious haha. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717640
        alankay 7y ago
        An interesting and unfortunately true commentary on the lack of civilized behavior using technology that actually required a fair amount of effort -- and civilized behavior -- to invent in the first place.
        DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
        Yeah, it's definitely disappointing that we have to worry about things like that, but that's the nature of the beast I guess. I hope you don't take any offense at my skepticism! For what it's worth, I'm happy assuming you're the real deal because being a cynic all the time is no fun and I have no specific reason to believe otherwise at the moment; I just also wouldn't be surprised to discover it's fake haha. Also, I walk by your face a few times a week whenever I head into my lab. MEB has redecorated a few times over the years, but they always have a section of pictures of notable alumni and (of course) you're up there. Thanks for giving us a good name in the field and for all you've done!
        alankay 7y ago
        Merrill Engineering Building! I'm glad it is still around. Those long hallways were used as a "display" to unroll the many pages of Simula machine code listings down one corridor so that three grad students -- including me -- could crawl over it and coordinate to try to understand just what Simula might actually be (the documentation in Norwegian that had been transliterated into English was not understandable).
crdrost 7y ago
I don't believe he claims to, no. He coined the term “object,” but what he meant by a computational object was different than what it came to mean: a data structure with associated operations upon it. Kay meant a parallel thread of execution which was generally sitting in a waiting state—one could make a very strong analogy between Smalltalk's vision of “objects” and what we call today “microservices,” albeit all living within the same programming language as an ecosystem rather than all being independent languages implementing some API. But whether this is an “object-oriented” vision depends on whether you think that an object is intrinsically a data structure or an independent computer with its own memory speaking a common API. The most visible difference is that in the latter case one object mutating any other object's properties is evil—it is one computer secretly modifying another’s memory—whereas in the other case it is shrug-worthy. But arguably the bigger issue is philosophical. That is hard to explain and so it might be best to have a specific example. So Smalltalk invents MVC and then you see endless reinventions that call themselves MVC in other languages. But most of these other adaptations of MVC have very object-oriented models: they describe some sort of data structure in some sort of data modeling language. But that is not the “object” understanding of a model in Smalltalk. When Smalltalk says “model” it means a computer which is maintaining two things: a current value of some data, and a list of subscribers to that value. Its API accepts requests to create/remove subscriptions, to modify the value, and to read the value. The modifications all send notifications to anyone who is subscribed to the value. There is not necessarily anything wrong with data-modeling the data, but it is not the central point of the model, which is the list of subscribers. A more extreme example: no OOP system that I know of would do something as barbarous as to implement a function which would do the following: > Search through memory for EVERY reference to that object, and replace it with a reference to this object. That just sounds like the worst idea ever in OOP-land; my understanding of objects is as data structures which are probably holding some sort of meaningful data; how dare you steal my data structure and replace it with another. But Smalltalk has this; it is called Object.become. If you are thinking of objects as these microservicey things then yeah, of course I want to find out how some microservice is misbehaving and then build a microservice that doesn't misbehave that way and then eventually swap my new microservice in for the running one. (That also hints at the necessary architecture to do this without literally scanning memory: like a DNS lookup giving you the actual address, every reference to an object must be a double-star pointer under the hood.) And as a direct consequence, when you are running Smalltalk you can modify almost every single bit of functionality in any of the standard libraries to be whatever you need it to be, live, while the program is running. Indeed the attitude in Smalltalk is that you will not write it in some text editor, but in the living program itself: the program you are designing is running as you are writing it and you use this ability to swap out components to massage it into the program that you need it to become.

Didn’t Alan Kay coin the term “object oriented”?

by skndr 7y ago

Didn’t Alan Kay coin the term “object oriented”?

hota_mazi 7y ago

That's what he claims but there's zero evidence besides his own word.

lliamander 7y ago
Well, how large is the pool of other possible candidates? Wouldn't someone from that time period (say the Simula folks, or another PARC employee) challenge that assertion? Why would he like?
DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
Ah, so you have evidence that it was somebody else?
- hota_mazi 7y ago
  I don't, but that's not how the burden of proof works.
  - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
    Every source I've ever come across on this topic (and I work in PL research) points to Kay as the originator of the term "object-oriented" in relation to programming. No exceptions. You are now making an affirmative assertion that Alan Kay did not coin the term. The burden of proof is on you, not him.
    - hota_mazi 7y ago
      Link these sources, then! Even someone who recently interviewed him and researched the subject for months confessed he could never corroborate that claim. You make the claim he coined the term, the burden of proof is on you. Until you do, it's perfectly reasonable and intellectually honest to reject that claim.
      - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
        Sure, it's impossible to corroborate at this point because there's no direct evidence of it. It's not like he wrote it in a mailing list that we still have access to. It was (according to what I've read about it) a verbal statement made in response to a question asked of him by someone else. I don't know who the other person is, though perhaps that would be a place to look. References I've seen have, of course, essentially all pointed back to Kay's claims. I imagine this is insufficient in your eyes, so I won't bother finding them for you. Arguing "it's reasonable and intellectually honest to reject [the claim that Kay coined the term]" is silly. It's not reasonable, because there's no real reason to suspect the claim to be false in the first place. For 50+ years it has been accepted knowledge that Kay coined the term. Nobody — including people with direct experience on the same teams or with otherwise opposing claims — has stepped forward to dispute this fact in all that time. This would be just like saying "Well I don't think da Vinci really made the Mona Lisa. I mean, all we have is his word for it. Sure, the painting didn't exist before him, and its existence appears to have started with him, and people at the time attribute its existence to him, but for all we know maybe somebody else did it and gave it to him to use as his own!" Sure, it's possible... but it's a silly claim to make (and hence not reasonable). Your position is not "intellectually honest" because it sincerely looks like you're just trying to be antagonistic. What's the point in arguing that Kay didn't coin the term? Do you have some unsung hero in mind you'd like to promote as the coiner? Or do you just like arguing against commonly-held beliefs for the sake of it? I don't see what you're trying to accomplish. Two more thoughts: 1. The only way to prove Kay didn't originally coin the term would be to find hard evidence of it used in a similar fashion (i.e., with regard to programming) from prior to 1966 (the time Kay claims he invented the term). 2. If you had such evidence, you would need to prove that Kay had seen it prior to his alleged coinage. In the absence of such proof, the existence of the term prior to Kay's use would be irrelevant. Why? Because the community as a whole has gone off of Kay's claim for the whole time. If somebody else conceived of "object-oriented programming", we didn't get it from them — we got it from Kay.
  - IOT_Apprentice 7y ago
    Alan Kay responded above so...
    - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
      Link at [0]. I'm a little skeptical. That user certainly writes in a similar style to how I've seen Alan Kay write online, but I wouldn't be opposed to seeing some more proof. A one-day-old HN account claiming to belong to one of the most important people in CS from the past 50 years seems a little suspicious haha. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717640 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19717640
      - alankay 7y ago
        An interesting and unfortunately true commentary on the lack of civilized behavior using technology that actually required a fair amount of effort -- and civilized behavior -- to invent in the first place.
        DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
        Yeah, it's definitely disappointing that we have to worry about things like that, but that's the nature of the beast I guess. I hope you don't take any offense at my skepticism! For what it's worth, I'm happy assuming you're the real deal because being a cynic all the time is no fun and I have no specific reason to believe otherwise at the moment; I just also wouldn't be surprised to discover it's fake haha. Also, I walk by your face a few times a week whenever I head into my lab. MEB has redecorated a few times over the years, but they always have a section of pictures of notable alumni and (of course) you're up there. Thanks for giving us a good name in the field and for all you've done!
        alankay 7y ago
        Merrill Engineering Building! I'm glad it is still around. Those long hallways were used as a "display" to unroll the many pages of Simula machine code listings down one corridor so that three grad students -- including me -- could crawl over it and coordinate to try to understand just what Simula might actually be (the documentation in Norwegian that had been transliterated into English was not understandable).

crdrost 7y ago

I don't believe he claims to, no. He coined the term “object,” but what he meant by a computational object was different than what it came to mean: a data structure with associated operations upon it. Kay meant a parallel thread of execution which was generally sitting in a waiting state—one could make a very strong analogy between Smalltalk's vision of “objects” and what we call today “microservices,” albeit all living within the same programming language as an ecosystem rather than all being independent languages implementing some API. But whether this is an “object-oriented” vision depends on whether you think that an object is intrinsically a data structure or an independent computer with its own memory speaking a common API. The most visible difference is that in the latter case one object mutating any other object's properties is evil—it is one computer secretly modifying another’s memory—whereas in the other case it is shrug-worthy. But arguably the bigger issue is philosophical. That is hard to explain and so it might be best to have a specific example. So Smalltalk invents MVC and then you see endless reinventions that call themselves MVC in other languages. But most of these other adaptations of MVC have very object-oriented models: they describe some sort of data structure in some sort of data modeling language. But that is not the “object” understanding of a model in Smalltalk. When Smalltalk says “model” it means a computer which is maintaining two things: a current value of some data, and a list of subscribers to that value. Its API accepts requests to create/remove subscriptions, to modify the value, and to read the value. The modifications all send notifications to anyone who is subscribed to the value. There is not necessarily anything wrong with data-modeling the data, but it is not the central point of the model, which is the list of subscribers. A more extreme example: no OOP system that I know of would do something as barbarous as to implement a function which would do the following: > Search through memory for EVERY reference to that object, and replace it with a reference to this object. That just sounds like the worst idea ever in OOP-land; my understanding of objects is as data structures which are probably holding some sort of meaningful data; how dare you steal my data structure and replace it with another. But Smalltalk has this; it is called Object.become. If you are thinking of objects as these microservicey things then yeah, of course I want to find out how some microservice is misbehaving and then build a microservice that doesn't misbehave that way and then eventually swap my new microservice in for the running one. (That also hints at the necessary architecture to do this without literally scanning memory: like a DNS lookup giving you the actual address, every reference to an object must be a double-star pointer under the hood.) And as a direct consequence, when you are running Smalltalk you can modify almost every single bit of functionality in any of the standard libraries to be whatever you need it to be, live, while the program is running. Indeed the attitude in Smalltalk is that you will not write it in some text editor, but in the living program itself: the program you are designing is running as you are writing it and you use this ability to swap out components to massage it into the program that you need it to become.