Jeff Gonis
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 19 months, 2013–2025
1:04:33 · 127K views · Feb 12, 2013
Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA keynote, preserved on YouTube after being lost from Google Video. He discusses what object orientation was meant to be, messaging, system design, and the state of computing practice.
Treated as a foundational talk, cited constantly for Kay's views on object-oriented programming and for rethinking software practice.
20 comments from Hacker News
You should check out Alan Kay's OOPSLA keynote "The Compute Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" at this video specifically about 20 mintues in where he says that a browser should be exactly what you say here. On the one hand, he was talking about this almost 20 years ago, on the other hand you're in good company because he's a pretty smart guy! I encourage all developers to watch that talk and do some thinking about the current state of our practice and where we want to go from here.
Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: this video If you want to see what "practical" OOP looked like in the 80s, this is a good video: [LINK]
The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet , OOPSLA 1997 keynote this video Others have already mentioned The Early History of Smalltalk , highly recommended. You'll probably want to read it a couple of times, revisit from time to time. The big idea is messaging, or rather "ma" [LINK] "The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be." "I think I recall also pointing out that it is vitally important not just to have a complete metasystem, but to have fences that help guard the crossing of metaboundaries." " I would say that a system that allowed other metathings to be done in the ordinary course of programming (like changing what inheritance means, or what is an instance) is a bad design. (I believe that systems should allow these things, but the design should be such that there are clear fences that have to be crossed when serious extensions are made.)" "I would suggest that more progress could be made if the smart and talented Squeak list would think more about what the next step in metaprogramming should be -- how can we get great power, parsimony, AND security of meaning?"
operating systems which are totally transparent and easily understood by their users I sort of glossed over this part so now I have a chance to elaborate. Alan Kay has put a ton of thought into this issue [1]. He firmly believes that we can build an operating system and application software with an extremely small footprint (LOC's) so that a single person can understand the whole thing. Since he gave that talk, we've moved further and further away from Kay's vision. We've made things more and more complex, opaque, centralized, and difficult to change. We've given away our future to big tech companies. Heck, we've even given away the past. We've lost much of the freedom we had back in the 90's, let alone the 70's and 80's when Kay did so much of his work. We're going to have to work incredibly hard just to regain what we've lost. [1] this video
I recently (re)discovered Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA talk: this video For others that have been following his work (and talks), it doesn't really contain much new stuff, but the context of a talk to an audience of programmers brings out some different contexts. He touches on the the fact that they didn't "just" spend extra money to prototype the dynabook in the form of the Alto - but they built 2000 machines - and part of that is of course so they could invite (among others) whole classes of school children to come and play with the tech.