4 ms·

He did tho. He mentioned more than once that OOP was more about message passing than behavior + state.

layer8 3y ago
Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? How do you ensure it will do what it is supposed to do? And Smalltalk wasn’t that, it is mostly just regular method calls and not “message passing”.
- Xelynega 3y ago
  Erlang(and more modernly elixir/Gleam) are an example of this in practice, and were created to make it easier to ensure the working and manage the complexity of large systems.
  - layer8 3y ago
    Fair enough. But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo.
    - MisterTea 3y ago
      Maybe because there is no one/right/simple answer. You really have to think for yourself and seek out answers instead of expecting them. You're doing that now but with the mistaken impression you were to be handed them.
    - asdajksah2123 3y ago
      If he said "use Erlang" then that eliminates the actual message he's trying to convey, which is message passing is good. I bet if he simply said "use Erlang", 99% of headlines and discussion would be "Alan Kay said Erlang is the greatest language evah!" I do appreciate that he respects his audience, ie me, enough that he thinks we can read "message passing is good" and go from there to choosing a message passing language that is suitable for our needs, or even using a non message passing language due to other factors, but recognizing that OOP is about message passing and not state encapsulation, which would impact how I code even in Java.
    - pests 3y ago
      > He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo. How is inventing Smalltalk and putting his ideas into reality just "waxing around" or "complaining"?
    - Phiwise_ 3y ago
      >But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this lecture where he says explicitly that Erlang should be the modern programmer's assembly? https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY In my experience, people who criticize Kay for being too vague or kvetching too pointlessly or lacking practical experience in computer science today almost always have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the vast majority of his work before deciding their opinion on it. It's hard to disagree with him that this makes us more like a pop culture than a profession after seeing it.
      - alexvoda 3y ago
        You hit the nail head on. The field of IT is a pop culture and consequently just as prone to fads and periodic fashions.
        Phiwise_ 3y ago
        If only. Unix would be dead and buried many years ago if it was just a fad. It's far more like the old repeating fertility rituals of many paganistic societies, where your neighbors burn your pagus down to cleanse the village of the spite of the undead grain god if you plowed your heath in a different direction from everyone else.
        sebastianconcpt 3y ago
        Just adding here that the understanding of the forces at play in a cultural war makes what you just said even more clear and for a vast spectrum of fields way beyond IT.
      - jhbadger 3y ago
        It's somewhat of a backhanded compliment though -- calling Erlang a "modern assembly" is like the quip that C is a "portable assembler" -- that is, a tool useful for low-level stuff but which you should mostly use to implement higher level languages on top of.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- joshmarinacci 3y ago
  Smalltalk is definitely message passing. There are many ways to intercept the messages and implement different responses. This one mechanism enables: network aware code, object proxies, sub-classing, on-the-fly code generation, and lots of other behavior. Traditional methods were invented later as less robust version of Smalltalk's message passing.
- chongli 3y ago
  He’s not just a proponent of message passing, he’s a proponent of late binding [1]. The idea there is to have a running image of the environment and interact with it in real time, updating code while it’s running (no recompiling or anything like that). The idea is a high level of interactivity with very tight feedback loops. A whole operating system like this would allow you to hack on the user interface and change things on the fly. All of your software would also work like this, promoting open extensibility by the user. You ought to be able to click on any window or other user interface element and be able to view and modify the running code live, without even restarting the computation it’s running (never mind the whole program or even rebooting the computer). This sort of ability to do live hacking on the internals of what you’re working with is how computers used to work in those early days. It’s also how machinery has always worked in the past. A mechanic could lock in the timing of an engine by rotating the distributor cap and listening to how smoothly it fires. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_binding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_binding
  - satellite2 3y ago
    A browser kind of fit the requirements.
    - Phiwise_ 3y ago
      Kay himself does regularly describe the Arpanet as one of the inspurations for OO, and the modern interbet browser as an incomplete implementation of the same ideas: https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0 https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0
  - yourapostasy 3y ago
    I wonder if all of that was in an operating system as described but backed by Nix so we accomplish the NixOS-style reproducibility and configuration time travel, what the developer experience and user experience would be like. Instead of binary blob images, we'd have Nix declaratives and flakes we dissect at will, without fear of wedging the system with the live modifications we make.
  - yourapostasy 3y ago
- hintymad 3y ago
  SmallTalk? Even though the language is mainstream, its many ideas, including implementation and design style using message passing, are embedded in many languages and software packages.
- projektfu 3y ago
  I disagree, not because methods do not get called, but because the Smalltalk sender is not calling a method, it is sending a message. It says to the runtime, here is an object and I want to send "#collect:" to it using this other object obj as a parameter. The runtime looks in the object's class for a method called "collect:" and, if found, calls the method with the receiver and obj. If not found, it will look in the superclasses until it cannot find it, then it will send "#doesNotUnderstand:" with the context, and go up the class hierarchy again. Because of the message-passing paradigm, the receiver can make behaviors that are unusual, such as proxying and delegation, in a more or less transparent fashion. If the sender is calling a method, then that is a static arrangement and the result is not different from a function call.
  - vanviegen 3y ago
    How does what you're describing differ from polymorphism, or from doing OOP in loosely typed languages like javascript?
    - fzzzy 3y ago
      Every single object in smalltalk is free to have its own implementation of handling a message. In javascript, the runtime decides for the object how to locate the code and how to call it.
- the_af 3y ago
  > Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? Reminds me of the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding (though I respect and like Alan Kay way more). If you've read any of his online interactions, apparently nobody does REST like he envisioned. It simply doesn't exist in the wild. When asked about some REST API, he'll claim it's not RESTful, it's wrong, that's not what he meant, etc. "But what would be right?", you ask, and he'll reply "Read my paper! HATEOAS! (Hypermedia as the engine of application state)". "Ok, but what does it mean in practice, how do I go about building an API with HATEOAS?"... ...and there's no answer for that besides "read my dissertation". He can only tell you what you're doing wrong, but nobody has been able to build a "true" RESTful API to Roy Fielding's satisfaction.
  - cxr 3y ago
    > the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding I think you're confused about who Fielding is and what REST is about. His writing isn't about building "true" RESTful APIs. It isn't really about APIs per se at all, RESTful or not. (Further, Fielding to my knowledge isn't even known for his use of the word "RESTful".) It sounds like you've probably been misled by a bunch of people who aren't Fielding about what's in his dissertation. Not unreasonable in those circumstances that one be told to actually read the thing instead of guessing at the gestalt of it based on ambient chatter which is by and large very misinformed. Having said that, Fielding's writing is not something I would exalt for its clarity. I'm partial to jcrites's explanatory powers: "REST describes how the Web works" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561>
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - fzzzy 3y ago
    It's incredibly easy to build hypermedia as the engine of application state sites. You generate html pages with state in them, and hyperlinks and forms that filter and change the state. Hateoas didn't invent anything. He literally just described how web 1.0 worked.
- Phiwise_ 3y ago
  Does a full free operating system, all the way down to the metal, and hypermedia publishing suite in 936kB count as "a system of any complexity" that "will do what it is supposed to do" to you? If not, what specifically is your standard? https://youtu.be/BUud1gcbS9k https://youtu.be/BUud1gcbS9k

Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? How do you ensure it will do what it is supposed to do? And Smalltalk wasn’t that, it is mostly just regular method calls and not “message passing”.

Xelynega 3y ago
Erlang(and more modernly elixir/Gleam) are an example of this in practice, and were created to make it easier to ensure the working and manage the complexity of large systems.
- layer8 3y ago
  Fair enough. But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo.
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    Maybe because there is no one/right/simple answer. You really have to think for yourself and seek out answers instead of expecting them. You're doing that now but with the mistaken impression you were to be handed them.
  - asdajksah2123 3y ago
    If he said "use Erlang" then that eliminates the actual message he's trying to convey, which is message passing is good. I bet if he simply said "use Erlang", 99% of headlines and discussion would be "Alan Kay said Erlang is the greatest language evah!" I do appreciate that he respects his audience, ie me, enough that he thinks we can read "message passing is good" and go from there to choosing a message passing language that is suitable for our needs, or even using a non message passing language due to other factors, but recognizing that OOP is about message passing and not state encapsulation, which would impact how I code even in Java.
  - pests 3y ago
    > He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo. How is inventing Smalltalk and putting his ideas into reality just "waxing around" or "complaining"?
  - Phiwise_ 3y ago
    >But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this lecture where he says explicitly that Erlang should be the modern programmer's assembly? https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY In my experience, people who criticize Kay for being too vague or kvetching too pointlessly or lacking practical experience in computer science today almost always have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the vast majority of his work before deciding their opinion on it. It's hard to disagree with him that this makes us more like a pop culture than a profession after seeing it.
    - alexvoda 3y ago
      You hit the nail head on. The field of IT is a pop culture and consequently just as prone to fads and periodic fashions.
      - Phiwise_ 3y ago
        If only. Unix would be dead and buried many years ago if it was just a fad. It's far more like the old repeating fertility rituals of many paganistic societies, where your neighbors burn your pagus down to cleanse the village of the spite of the undead grain god if you plowed your heath in a different direction from everyone else.
      - sebastianconcpt 3y ago
        Just adding here that the understanding of the forces at play in a cultural war makes what you just said even more clear and for a vast spectrum of fields way beyond IT.
    - jhbadger 3y ago
      It's somewhat of a backhanded compliment though -- calling Erlang a "modern assembly" is like the quip that C is a "portable assembler" -- that is, a tool useful for low-level stuff but which you should mostly use to implement higher level languages on top of.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
joshmarinacci 3y ago
Smalltalk is definitely message passing. There are many ways to intercept the messages and implement different responses. This one mechanism enables: network aware code, object proxies, sub-classing, on-the-fly code generation, and lots of other behavior. Traditional methods were invented later as less robust version of Smalltalk's message passing.
chongli 3y ago
He’s not just a proponent of message passing, he’s a proponent of late binding [1]. The idea there is to have a running image of the environment and interact with it in real time, updating code while it’s running (no recompiling or anything like that). The idea is a high level of interactivity with very tight feedback loops. A whole operating system like this would allow you to hack on the user interface and change things on the fly. All of your software would also work like this, promoting open extensibility by the user. You ought to be able to click on any window or other user interface element and be able to view and modify the running code live, without even restarting the computation it’s running (never mind the whole program or even rebooting the computer). This sort of ability to do live hacking on the internals of what you’re working with is how computers used to work in those early days. It’s also how machinery has always worked in the past. A mechanic could lock in the timing of an engine by rotating the distributor cap and listening to how smoothly it fires. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_binding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_binding
- satellite2 3y ago
  A browser kind of fit the requirements.
  - Phiwise_ 3y ago
    Kay himself does regularly describe the Arpanet as one of the inspurations for OO, and the modern interbet browser as an incomplete implementation of the same ideas: https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0 https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0
- yourapostasy 3y ago
  I wonder if all of that was in an operating system as described but backed by Nix so we accomplish the NixOS-style reproducibility and configuration time travel, what the developer experience and user experience would be like. Instead of binary blob images, we'd have Nix declaratives and flakes we dissect at will, without fear of wedging the system with the live modifications we make.
- yourapostasy 3y ago
hintymad 3y ago
SmallTalk? Even though the language is mainstream, its many ideas, including implementation and design style using message passing, are embedded in many languages and software packages.
projektfu 3y ago
I disagree, not because methods do not get called, but because the Smalltalk sender is not calling a method, it is sending a message. It says to the runtime, here is an object and I want to send "#collect:" to it using this other object obj as a parameter. The runtime looks in the object's class for a method called "collect:" and, if found, calls the method with the receiver and obj. If not found, it will look in the superclasses until it cannot find it, then it will send "#doesNotUnderstand:" with the context, and go up the class hierarchy again. Because of the message-passing paradigm, the receiver can make behaviors that are unusual, such as proxying and delegation, in a more or less transparent fashion. If the sender is calling a method, then that is a static arrangement and the result is not different from a function call.
- vanviegen 3y ago
  How does what you're describing differ from polymorphism, or from doing OOP in loosely typed languages like javascript?
  - fzzzy 3y ago
    Every single object in smalltalk is free to have its own implementation of handling a message. In javascript, the runtime decides for the object how to locate the code and how to call it.
the_af 3y ago
> Yes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? Reminds me of the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding (though I respect and like Alan Kay way more). If you've read any of his online interactions, apparently nobody does REST like he envisioned. It simply doesn't exist in the wild. When asked about some REST API, he'll claim it's not RESTful, it's wrong, that's not what he meant, etc. "But what would be right?", you ask, and he'll reply "Read my paper! HATEOAS! (Hypermedia as the engine of application state)". "Ok, but what does it mean in practice, how do I go about building an API with HATEOAS?"... ...and there's no answer for that besides "read my dissertation". He can only tell you what you're doing wrong, but nobody has been able to build a "true" RESTful API to Roy Fielding's satisfaction.
- cxr 3y ago
  > the RESTful guy, Roy Fielding I think you're confused about who Fielding is and what REST is about. His writing isn't about building "true" RESTful APIs. It isn't really about APIs per se at all, RESTful or not. (Further, Fielding to my knowledge isn't even known for his use of the word "RESTful".) It sounds like you've probably been misled by a bunch of people who aren't Fielding about what's in his dissertation. Not unreasonable in those circumstances that one be told to actually read the thing instead of guessing at the gestalt of it based on ambient chatter which is by and large very misinformed. Having said that, Fielding's writing is not something I would exalt for its clarity. I'm partial to jcrites's explanatory powers: "REST describes how the Web works" <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23672561>
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- fzzzy 3y ago
  It's incredibly easy to build hypermedia as the engine of application state sites. You generate html pages with state in them, and hyperlinks and forms that filter and change the state. Hateoas didn't invent anything. He literally just described how web 1.0 worked.
Phiwise_ 3y ago
Does a full free operating system, all the way down to the metal, and hypermedia publishing suite in 936kB count as "a system of any complexity" that "will do what it is supposed to do" to you? If not, what specifically is your standard? https://youtu.be/BUud1gcbS9k https://youtu.be/BUud1gcbS9k