What Smalltalk Was Not?

> "Kay often presents the idea of two orthogonal places of technological development. The blue plane is where current paradigms and ways of working exist. … the pink plane represents a move out of the blue plane, an innovation that opens up whole new ways of thinking about the problem being addressed…"

Graham Lee has mixed-up pink and blue — which is odd given the well-known phrase "blue sky thinking".

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> "Sewing machines make it easier and cheaper for someone to buy pre-made clothes off a rack in a store than to make their own clothes."

No, not sewing machines. "Less than 2 per cent of garment workers globally earn a living wage. When we buy a £4 dress from a fast fashion brand, it isn’t cheap by magic, it’s cheap because somebody else is paying the price."

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/fast-fashio...

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> "Presumably object-oriented programming with Smalltalk is a [blue]-plane idea that makes programming unrecognisably different from its procedural beginnings, and we are all to dense to notice that."

No, presumably not. After Alan Kay said "And actually I made up the term object oriented and I can tell you, I did not have C++ in mind" he immediately continued to say — "So the important thing here is I have many of the same feelings about smalltalk … I think there's one really important thing about smalltalk and, some of the languages like it that we should pay really, really close attention to, but it has almost nothing to do with either the syntax, or the accumulated superclass library, both of which of these are taken as being the language as though it was issued from, some gods on Olympus."

As-in "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet"!

https://smallproblems.substack.com/p/the-computer-revolution...

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> "If the software you are working on is going to automate some business process…"

Then the business process is fixed; and progress is reduced to pink-plane optimization.

otoh 'I went over and started to paw around, and discovered fairly soon that the bottom-level call on BitBlt was recieving Fractions as parameters, and was therefore failing. As I looked around to see how that happened, I was astounded to find that the entire browser in question had fractions in practically every point and rectangle in all its views and subviews. I asked him about this, and he said, "I just reframed it, but maybe it was because I made divide return a fraction." I said, "Hmm, maybe so. What do you send to a Fraction to get the integer part?" He told me. I added the coercion to BitBlt's fail code, and the whole thing proceeded to run just fine when I restarted the method. I remember feeling almost dizzy on the way back to my office.'

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...

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> "A better way of designing a computer program needs to either also be a better way of describing the world than a procedure… OOP does not do this."

So Graham Lee asserts. Someone else could as easily assert — OOP does do this.

His first example promotes what may be an arbitrary sequence over the need to mix a pound of strong flour and half a pint of warm water.

His third example ignores the balance of forces that hold "a body at rest".

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> "But [OOP] did not fundamentally change the way we do business … still procedures in and procedures out, with the computer taking responsibility either for executing or shepherding the procedural flow."

otoh '"Contrary to the idea that a computer is exciting because the programmer can create something from seemingly nothing, our users were shown that a computer is exciting because it can be a vast storehouse of already existing ideas (models) that can be retrieved and modified for the user's personal needs. Programming could be viewed and enjoyed as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary act. The frustration of long hours of writing linear streams of code and then hoping to see some aspect of that code execute was replaced by incremental development. Emphasis was placed on learning how to make effective use of existing system components (objects in the Smalltalk sense).'

page 354 "Is the Smalltalk-80 System for Children?"

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1981-08/page/n367/...

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> "But [Alan Kay's OOP] did not fundamentally change the way we do business … It is therefore a [pink] plane improvement…"

What we have done with OOP may be a pink-plane improvement.

Have we actually done Alan Kay's OOP?