Alan Kay Receives ACM Turing Award

TheAncientHacker writes "Alan Kay, the creator of the Smalltalk computer language (and a good deal of what we call Object Oriented Programming) is the winner of this year's Turing Award from the ACM. Kay is also the co-winner of this year's Charles Stark Draper Prize. For more, check out the website of Kay's latest project, Squeak - an open, highly-portable Smalltalk-80 implementation go to the Squeak homepage or the page of the SqueakLand community which uses Squeak in schools. For more on Kay's Turing Award, see this article on the SqueakLand site." Couple of other awards to announce: bth writes "The Association for Computing Machinery announced that it has recognized Dr. Stuart I. Feldman for creating a seminal piece of software engineering known as Make. Almost every software developer in the world has used Make, or one of its descendants, as a tool for maintaining computer software. Dr. Feldman will receive the 2003 ACM Software System Award." And finally, squidfrog writes "Nick Holonyak Jr., inventor of the LED, is being awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize at a ceremony in Washington. Edith Flanigen, 75, was also recognized, with the $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Lifetime Achievement Award for her work on a new generation of 'molecular sieves,' porous crystals that can separate molecules by size."

Re:MVC too?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure it did. Interestingly, the modern comercial Smalltalks have moved beyond MVC. Squeak uses Morphic. From Smalltalk's point of view, MVC is so early 90s

Surprising

[andy666]

It is surprising that the chose not to honor Martin Davis of NYU, since so many OOP ideas are implicit in his work.

Re:I invented the term!

[gowen]

watching a presentation from someone

Niklaus Wirth [uni-trier.de]

about some "wonderful" new product

Project Oberon...

There's no justice I tell you!

[kahei]

Cobbling together the mass of awkward syntax, unextendability, and tabs that is make ranks alongside actual advancement of human knowledge? I'd rather they'd awarded the prize on the basis of something other than sheer number of victims :)

Thank goodness for Ant -- teaching the world that we don't need to use make any more was the best thing Java ever did for us.

Hrm, well, that was my curmudgeonly rant for the day.

Re:I invented the term!

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't Wirth, it was someone who worked for him. The story is ripped off verbatim from here [c2.com]

Squeak? I guess I could use a new hobby.

[YetAnotherName]

SmallTalk was always an intriguing language to me, and mostly because it used some kind of integrated graphic shell, it used glyphs not found in US-ASCII, and there weren't any decent free SmallTalk environments available for the longest time.

Now with Squeak [squeak.org] and this quick tutorial [mucow.com], it might be about time to explore SmallTalk.

Besides, I've always wanted a real OO language where I could send the message "to:do:" to the object "1".

No he did not

[Anonymous Coward]

Kristen Nygaard invented object-oriented programming together with Ole-Johan Dahl at the Norwegian Computing Center.

Squeak - not so old after all

[Anonymous Coward]

You should really take the time to get up to speed on the new stuff if you haven't paid attention since school.

Check out this web-app technology [beta4.com] built (first) in squeak, now also available in the descendant to ParcPlace smalltalk (now Cincom Smalltalk [cincomsmalltalk.com])

Also of interest is croquet [slashdot.org], a virtual 3d environment. I saw a live demo [cincomsmalltalk.com] of this where the presenter (David Smith, one of the engineers) showed his avatar moving between worlds existing one each on two separate machines. It was not fast, but not as slow as you might expect.

Also, smalltalk solutions [smalltalksolutions.com] is next week (in Seattle) so come by if you're interested and available.

P.S. what is now known as Squeak was started at Apple. The Squeak group left Apple during Amelio's reign when the company was gutting it's research depts.

Re:There's no justice I tell you!

[alanxyzzy]

A bit more googling turns up this quote from Stuart Feldman [faqs.org]

Why the tab in column 1? Yacc was new, Lex was brand new. I hadn't tried either, so I figured this would be a good excuse to learn. After getting myself snarled up with my first stab at Lex, I just did something simple with the pattern newline-tab. It worked, it stayed. And then a few weeks later I had a user population of about a dozen, most of them friends, and I didn't want to screw up my embedded base. The rest, sadly, is history.

Re:MVC too?

[joeyGibson]

Cincom Smalltalk, which is the descendant of VisualWorks, still uses MVC. Dolphin, an excellent commercial ST for Windows, uses a modified version of MVC called MVP - Model View Presenter. Squeak is, to my knowledge, the only ST that has really deviated from MVC in a meaningful way. And it certainly isn't commercial.

In case you didn't know

[jabbadabbadoo]

As a side note, Alan Kay took a lot of ideas from the original object oriented language, Simula [umich.edu], created by Norwegian researcher in the late 60's.

Simula is still used and there is a research facility [simula.no] named after it.

Alan Kay Etech 2003 presentation

[redlum]

Here's a presentation at Etech 2003 [lisarein.com] Alan Kay gave on some early computer projects that were way ahead of their time and he also demoed his latest project: Croquet -- which is a 3D collaborative environment pretty close to Metaverse.

Re:A Great Squeak Demo

[dreadway]

non-linky address:
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5

*sigh*

Re:I invented the term!

[BdosError]

According to the linked Wiki page, the talk was with regard to Oberon 1, which did not support inheritance or polymorphism. Oberon 2, they claim, does support those features.

Re:MVC too?

[Espen]

The MVC pattern was invented by Trygve Reenskaug [ifi.uio.no] and later implemented for the SmallTalk-80 class library by others at Xerox Park.

Re:MVC too?

[Fearless Freep]

>Xerox Park.

That's PARC, for Palo Alto Research Center

Misquoted.

[voodoo1man]

The actual quote is:

"It is the difference of point of view that leads to problems: point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

It is from an essay of Alan Kay's, printed in Winston and Prendergast's (eds.) AI Business, 1984.

Re:Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a good choice, for precisely those reasons. Maths is not about the particular notation used, and in fact, "intuitive" infix notation with precedence rules... isn't sensible at all. It's just drummed into you at an early age. Like the fucking stupid place close buttons are placed in windows that means even linux window managers default to it now.

A similarly good choice for teaching maths would be lisp or forth.

Re:Surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/cs/faculty/davism/ [nyu.edu]

What NYU is really like [seventeen.com]

Fuck CS. No one goes to NYU for academics.