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> (see also Alan Kay's vision of software inspired by biological cells and systems – lots of talk, no non-trivial proofs of concept). I just wanted to say that

> (see also Alan Kay's vision of software inspired by biological cells and systems – lots of talk, no non-trivial proofs of concept). I just wanted to say that actually Kay's vision was implemented in something very non-trivial, both on the hardware side - Alto, and the Smalltalk operating system. They were used by real people and exhibited lots of traits that this article talks about. And some of their ideas were hugely influential in mainstream computing. I love the demo of one of the Smalltalk programs in this talk by Alan Kay [0], starts at around 40:30 [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2LZLYcu_JY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2LZLYcu_JY

adwn 6y ago
In what way does Smalltalk embody the concepts underlying biological cells and systems? Note that objects sending messages to other objects has very little to do with that – it would look more like lots of identical objects emitting lots of identical messages into a shared medium, and lots of objects receiving none, some, or many of those messages (a stochastical process) and reacting in a more or less deterministic manner. Such a system would be hell to develop, debug, and maintain. Which is why we don't design systems that way. Which is exactly my point.