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I generally agree but in case it helps anyone: > Apparently oo as envisioned by Alan Kay was supposed to work like cells in the body that pass messages between
by eyelidlessness 5y ago
I generally agree but in case it helps anyone:
> Apparently oo as envisioned by Alan Kay was supposed to work like cells in the body that pass messages between each other and take actions independently.
> Why? Who knows!
A very probable good mental model for what was intended is Erlang/OTP or the Actor Model generally. The idea of encapsulated systems which interface opaquely is very well represented there. And the reasoning and benefits are as well.
- bedobi 5y agoDon't get me wrong, it's an interesting idea which deserves pursuing, if nothing else but to satisfy our curiosity and seeing to what if anything it's applicable and suited. (and even if the answer turns out to be "nothing", we've still learned something!) But going from there to making strong claims about it being a more or less universally superior paradigm for computing and writing code, with little to zero evidence, that's a huge, huge stretch. To the degree Erlang and Actors work, I think that's kind of a happy coincidence, and not due to any rigorous work on Alan Kay's part.
- eyelidlessness 5y agoYou may want to spend time with Joe Armstrong’s take on the matter. If nothing else it’ll be interesting. And the elegance of something may or may not speak to rigor, but that doesn’t mean rigor doesn’t bear it out. It’s not as if Erlang is some flash in the pan, it’s been an incredibly important part of large scale real world computing.
- agumonkey 5y agoOn my first year I honestly thought java was working like Erlang (which I didn't know of at the time). Objects being independent parallel threads sending messages. Then teacher laughed at the idea.