Wednesday, August 6, 2003

I mentioned The Early History of Smalltalk (alternate download) by Alan Kay in a post last week.  I finally finished reading the entire article and found it very interesting.  It's got a lot of good insight into the early workings of Xerox PARC, as well as a great viewpoint on the beginnings of OO languages and programming. The article covers a lot of ground, but some of the key elements (at least to me) include: The amazing amount of technology that was created at PARC in about a ten year period:  the mouse, the personal computer with bit-mapped display, the laser printer, Smalltalk, Ethernet, LANs, OO programming, windowed GUIs, the idea of laptops, and so on.  A few dozen people invented what we call modern computing 30 years ago!  The disturbing part is that we haven't really advanced on what they did.  Alan Kay mentioned this and attributed it to the commercialization of personal computing. The primary focus of Alan Kay and the LSG was on making computer programming accessible to children.  They had some successes, but eventually ran up against what they called the hacker phenomenon:  "for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it at all natural".  This is analogous to the difference between knowing how to read and write and being literate, "The connection to literacy was painfully clear.  It isn't enough to just learn to read and write.  There is also a literature that renders ideas.  Language is used to read and write about them, but at some point the organization of ideas starts to dominate mere language abilities." Lisp had a large influence on the development of Smalltalk, as did Alan Kay's background in Molecular Biology.  You really have to read the full article to get the feel for what they envisioned with OO languages.  I have to think that the statically typed OO languages that are popular today are something of a bastardization of what they had in mind. I would highly recommend reading this article. 9:25:36 PM

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