I'm so glad I never read this before (and am looking for ways to forget that I
just did ....)
Cheers,
Alan
>________________________________
>From: John Zabroski <johnzabro...@gmail.com>
>To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>; Fundamentals of New Computing
><fonc@vpri.org>
>Cc: Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <je...@merlintec.com>
>Sent: Thursday, September 1, 2011 10:31 AM
>Subject: Re: [fonc] Re: Ceres and Oberon
>
>
>Has [1] been mentioned yet? If so, apologies.
>
>I think many here are implicitly referencing this when bringing up Oberon.
>
>[1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HeInventedTheTerm
>
>
>On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 2:25 PM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>The Flex Machine was "the omelet you have to throw away to clean the pan", so
>I haven't put any effort into saving that history. But there were "4 or 5"
>pretty good things and "4 or 5" really bad things that helped the
>Alto-Smalltalk effort a few years later. I'd say that the huge factors after
>having tried to do one of these were two geniuses: Chuck Thacker (who was an
>infinitely better hardware designer and builder than I was), and Dan Ingalls
>(who was infinitely better at most phases of software design and
>implementation than I was).
>>
>>
>>Cheers,
>>
>>
>>Alan
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>________________________________
>>>From: Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <je...@merlintec.com>
>>>To: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>; Fundamentals of New Computing
>>><fonc@vpri.org>
>>>Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2011 3:09 PM
>>>Subject: Re: [fonc] Re: Ceres and Oberon
>>>
>>>
>>>Alan,
>>>
>>>thanks for the detailed history!
>>>
>>>
>>>> 1966 was the year I entered grad school (having programmed for 4-5 years,
>>>> but essentially knowing nothing about computer science). Shortly after
>>>> encounters with and lightning bolts from the sky induced by Sketchpad and
>>>> Simula, I found the Euler papers and thought you could make
something with
>>>> "objects" that would be nicer if you used Euler for a basis rather than how
>>>> Simula was built on Algol. That turned out to be the case and I built this
>>>> into
>>>> the table-top plus display plus pointing device personal computer Ed
>>>> Cheadle
>>>> and I made over the next few years.
>>>
>>>
>>>Is this available anywhere beyond the small fragments at
>>>
>>>http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay68.html
>>>
>>>and
>>>
>>>http://www.mprove.de/diplom/gui/kay69.html
>>>
>>>?
>>>
>>>Though you often mention the machine itself, I have never seen you put
>>>these texts in the list of what people should read like you do with
>>>Ivan's thesis.
>>>
>>>
>>>> The last time I looked at Oberon (at Apple more than 15 years ago) it did
>>>> not impress, and did not resemble anything I would call an
object-oriented
>>>> language -- or an advance on anything that was already done in the 70s.
>>>> But that's just my opinion. And perhaps it has improved since then.
>>>
>>>
>>>It was an attempt to step back from the complexity of Modula-2, which is
>>>a good thing. It has the FONC goal of being small enough to be
>>>completely read and understood by one person (he does mention that this
>>>is in the form of a 600 page book in the talk).
>>>
>>>In the early 1990s I was trying to build a really low cost computer
>>>around the Self language and a professor who always had interesting
>>>insights suggested that something done with Oberon would require fewer
>>>hardware resources. I studied the language and saw that they had
>>>recently made it object oriented:
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon-2_%28programming_language%29
>>>
>>>But it turned out that
this was a dead end and the then current system
>>>was built with the original, non object oriented version of the language
>>>(as it is to this day - the OO programming Wirth mentioned in the talk
>>>is the kind of thing you can do in plain C). I liked the size of the
>>>system, but the ALL CAPS code hurt my eyes and the user interface was
>>>awkward (both demonstrators in the movie had problems using it, though
>>>Wirth had the excuse that he hadn't used it in a long time).
>>>
>>>-- Jecel
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>
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