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Alan Kay Did Not Invent Objects (2019)
People keep claiming that modern OOP languages aren’t “really OOP” because they don’t follow Alan Kay’s definition of “OOP”. I can see the logic here, even if I disagree the conclusion. More recently I’ve seen people start claiming that Kay invented objects entirely. This is factually incorrect. Alan Kay did not invent objects. They come from Simula, which the Smalltalk-72 manual cites as a major inspiration (pg 117). The famous 1981 Byte magazine issue that popularized Smalltalk and OOP explicitly says “the fundamental idea of objects, messages, and classes came from SIMULA.
The famous 1981 Byte magazine issue that popularized Smalltalk and OOP explicitly says “the fundamental idea of objects, messages, and classes came from SIMULA.” It says that Simula allows users to create “object-oriented systems”, which is probably going to far but still. The central idea in writing Small talk programs, then, is to define classes which handle communication among objects in the created environment. In his vision, the PC would be a something totally under the user’s control, everything from core system logic to the graphic rendering tweakable and explorable at runtime.
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