I think Alan Kay is saying that messages aren't good enough, and so he favors objects over data, because objects are more than data, they are also the interpret

I think Alan Kay is saying that messages aren't good enough, and so he favors objects over data, because objects are more than data, they are also the interpreter of the data. My understanding is that he'd favor something where the code to interpret the message is also serialized and stored/retrieved and passed around, which is how I think Smalltalk works. Thus Alan Kay favors objects, which are not actually data, but they are data+interpreter bundled together. Where as Rich Hickey favors data on its own, and facilities to represent and model data alone, independently of a given interpreter, and then he favors having various external things apply their own interpretation of the data. At least that's my reading of their discussion.