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I guess I am too dumb to understand these high concept talks, especially from the past when words meant different things than today. Why should every object be

I guess I am too dumb to understand these high concept talks, especially from the past when words meant different things than today. Why should every object be a server. How does slapping a TCP and IP parser to every struct helps something. How does it relate to bacteria. Yeah OK metaprogramming. The more a program use metaprogramming, the less readable it usually is. I don't know. I am not Alan Kay and I didn't create OOP and Smalltalk so I guess I will stick to more practical things rather than philisophising about computer languages, and how objects will save everything. (I like Smalltalk for what it is.)

meheleventyone 6y ago
> Why should every object be a server. How does slapping a TCP and IP parser to every struct helps something. How does it relate to bacteria. The point is that objects should be independent and communicate by messaging. The substrate doesn't really matter but both bacteria and computers on a network are examples of that scheme. The Actor model is the same idea developed for concurrency.
andrekandre 6y ago
alan kay is really interested in scaling performance considerations aside, having every object (stateless or not) have an ip and run asyncronously (just like on the internet) allows you to scale out and replace the implementation at any time (just like on the internet) if you are programming in the small (say c with structs) its hard to see the advantage of that, but if your programming system was "done right" you could have the same semantics and get both high performance and high scalability one thing that alan kay says alot is, the internet is basically the only system to run for decades and still have all its parts changed and yet never taken down for maintanence (outside of living things that is, which is where the biological comparison comes in) every object having an ip means, basically, the same thing, you could have a system run for decades in a distributed fasion and never need to be taken down for maintanence... thats the idea as far as i understand it

meheleventyone 6y ago

> Why should every object be a server. How does slapping a TCP and IP parser to every struct helps something. How does it relate to bacteria. The point is that objects should be independent and communicate by messaging. The substrate doesn't really matter but both bacteria and computers on a network are examples of that scheme. The Actor model is the same idea developed for concurrency.

andrekandre 6y ago

alan kay is really interested in scaling performance considerations aside, having every object (stateless or not) have an ip and run asyncronously (just like on the internet) allows you to scale out and replace the implementation at any time (just like on the internet) if you are programming in the small (say c with structs) its hard to see the advantage of that, but if your programming system was "done right" you could have the same semantics and get both high performance and high scalability one thing that alan kay says alot is, the internet is basically the only system to run for decades and still have all its parts changed and yet never taken down for maintanence (outside of living things that is, which is where the biological comparison comes in) every object having an ip means, basically, the same thing, you could have a system run for decades in a distributed fasion and never need to be taken down for maintanence... thats the idea as far as i understand it