Was Alan Kay wrong? And why does that matter?

My original joke on Twitter was that I was waiting for Alan Kay to tell everybody how Smalltalk did reactive programming and FRP first.

My original point is Alan Kay has made a hobby of co-opting virtually any paradigmatic trend or fad that has arisen since his original work on Smalltalk, usually claiming Smalltalk did it first/better/whatever.

The point here isn't original sin or only creating objectively perfect things. It's a different problem of people who don't seem otherwise engaged with the work being done in the present only talking about the work they did in the past.

Call for information: is anybody aware of Alan Kay directly contributing to the development of any open source programming languages that aren't Smalltalk in recent history?

I'm not aware of him releasing any new languages or publishing any new papers in the last decade or two, yet his paradigmatic peanut gallery commentary seems to spread pretty quickly.

I haven't seen anybody actually say what raganwald is attacking here.

The question of whether Kay is wrong is meaningless. Kay can't be wrong when he says what he means by OOP. You can discuss what language features and programming practices are useful in particular contexts, and you can argue whether Kay's definition of OOP represents a particularly meaningful set of features and approaches. But to discuss whether he was wrong is pointless, and to frame a discussion of OOP in those terms -- and to pretend it has any meaningful analogy to evaluation of how Newton was right, and how he was wrong, in his physical models is pointless. Its an analogy that serves to try to create a false connection and sense of generality, and does more to obscure than illuminate.

It should be obvious by now that OOP is a programming method that is possible in any programming language, and it is easier in some and harder in others. There is no language that exists where you can't force out non-OOP code, and you can always build your own OOP framework, even in C or assembly.

A more productive use of the quote would be to compare the design of small talk and lisp vs say java and c++, and think about why someone as brilliant as Alan Kay should consider that it is not easy to write OOP code in java or c++.

2. I recently have been spending time learning and using the Go language from Google. It has almost no facilities for booting new languages. Nowadays that's called building a DSL. The thing is, Go is very useful, efficient, and easy to learn. Plus, it has an excellent system for concurrent and parallel programming. They explicitly decided against building in facilities for DSLs, as they are seen as making systems hard to understand.

Alan Kay wasn't wrong, he had a particular point of view. To me, today, Kay's view seems old-fashioned compared to Go. Both Go and Kay's OOP are very sophisticated. In very different ways.