A commercial hit record for teenagers doesn’t have to have any particular musical merits. http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273 Alan Kay Any company large enough to have a research lab is too large to listen to it. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay I would compare the Smalltalk stuff that we did in the '70s with something like a Gothic cathedral. We had two ideas, really. One of them we got from Lisp: late binding. The other one was the idea of objects. Those gave us something a little bit like the arch, so we were able to make complex, seemingly large structures out of very little material, but I wouldn't put us much past the engineering of 1,000 years ago. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay I'm not against types, but I don't know of any type systems that aren't a complete pain, so I still like dynamic typing. Alan Kay If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273 Alan Kay Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay Just a gentle reminder that I took some pains at the last OOPSLA to try to remind everyone that Smalltalk is not only NOT its syntax or the class library, it is not even about classes. I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea.The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's source: something that was never quite completed in our Xerox PARC phase). http://wiki.gungfu.de/Main/ObjectOrientedProgramming Alan Kay Most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture. http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273 Alan Kay OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them. http://wiki.gungfu.de/Main/ObjectOrientedProgramming Alan Kay Revolutions come from standing on the shoulders of giants and facing in a better direction. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible. Alan Kay So the problem is-I've said this about both Smalltalk and Lisp-they tend to eat their young. What I mean is that both Lisp and Smalltalk are really fabulous vehicles, because they have a meta-system. They have so many ways of dealing with problems that the early-binding languages don't have, that it's very, very difficult for people who like Lisp or Smalltalk to imagine anything else. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Alan Kay The great problem with Lisp is that it is just good enough to keep us from developing something really good. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay The one thing it [Lisp] has going against it is that it is not a crystallization of style. The people who use it must have a great deal of personal style themselves. But I think if you can have one language on your system, of the ones that have been around for a while, it should be Lisp. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay The real romance is out ahead and yet to come. The computer revolution hasn't started yet. Don't be misled by the enormous flow of money into bad defacto standards for unsophisticated buyers using poor adaptations of incomplete ideas. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay Until real software engineering is developed, the next best practice is to develop with a dynamic system that has extreme late binding in all aspects. http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay [Lisp is] "the greatest single programming language ever designed" http://bc.tech.coop/blog/060224.html Alan Kay