If you read the first edition of his book[1], it's pretty clear about what he was trying for, which IIRC was essentially resumable software components as black

If you read the first edition of his book[1], it's pretty clear about what he was trying for, which IIRC was essentially resumable software components as black boxes that you could buy off the shelf and integrate in your own products. I find this quote interesting: > But in addition, “I had just become incredibly annoyed with proprietary languages,” he said. Fortran vendors, for instance, would add extra features to try to lock customers into their particular version. But this is exactly what he did with Objective-C -- it was a proprietary language until NeXT bought his company! It could have had widespread adoption had there been a widely available implementation. [1] https://archive.org/details/objectorientedpr00coxb https://archive.org/details/objectorientedpr00coxb