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."

MVC too?

[UrgleHoth]

Doesn't the model-view-controller pattern originally come from smalltalk?

New generation?

[Otter]

I was impressed that a 75 year old is doing cutting-edge work but this "new generation" of sieves seems to have actually been new in the 1950's. Good for her, in any case.

Wasn't MOOcode based on Smalltalk?

[phreakmonkey]

I seem to remember that PARC's LambdaMoo "MOOCode" was based partially on Smalltalk. (Oddly enough, I learned about OO programming from MOOcode.) It actually made a good model for learning OO concepts.

-P.M.

Squeak - old news

[Percent Man]

"Back in the day," an OOD class I took at Georgia Tech was taught in Squeak - which was widely held to be waning in favor even then. I don't see how it's groundbreaking now.

Not to say it's good for nothing - Squeak is particularly good at web crawling apps, IIRC.

As an added bit of trivia, I believe Squeak was so named because one of its biggest proponents is the Mouse himself [disney.com].

Squeak is useful in education

[mwyner]

We have a 6th grade math teacher in our school I work with who's been using Squeak to talk about various math concepts. The kids are really into it and constantly engaged. They get into making their own objects and it's a great jumping off point for me to teach them some rudimentary programming skills too.

Re:There's no justice I tell you!

[alanxyzzy]

Cobbling together the mass of awkward syntax, unextendability, and tabs that is make ranks alongside actual advancement of human knowledge?

There is an anecdote (I can't vouch for its accuracy) that

Stuart Feldman, the Bell Labs guy who invented "make", woke up one morning a few weeks after he'd released it, and realized that the syntax basically sucked - all those tabs and colons and weird continuation rules. He started working on something better and was shot down because someone said "Stuart, there are *dozens* of people using this, it's too late to change it."

Re:Wasn't MOOcode based on Smalltalk?

[RevAaron]

From what I've read, LambdaMoo's language isn't derived directly from Smalltalk, though it is derived in a way similar to how Java is, though not in the way that Self or Objective-C are.

LambdaMoo and similar systems are very cool, indeed. Something we bring up on the Squeak Smalltalk mailing list sometimes. In addition to the kind of stuff vanilla Smalltalk supports, in a MOO you've also (usually) got a multi-user system spread over multiple servers with full objectspersistance for free. badass.

Alan Kay is awesome

[streak]

So Alan Kay used to work in a segment of our offices devoted to Squeak development before he officially joined up with HP. I've met him a few times and I've worked very closely with one of his collegues who is actually leaving my company to join Alan again at HP.
He is an amazing guy and Squeak is a pretty cool language/environment to program in.
Its nice to see his work with Squeak finally being recognized. Word has it that he and some other people (including the guy who is leaving our company) are going to be working on some educational software in Squeak that will come with HP PCs.

Re:Squeak - old news

[RevAaron]

Squeak is indeed groundbreaking. That doesn't mean it's the best tool for every job, though. While it is in fact good for a lot of things, web crawling apps wouldn't be one of those that come to mind. I'd use perl most likely, and I'm an huge Squeak user and proponent.

I can't say whether or not Squeak was named for Disney, although Squeak was developed under Disney for some years, with the team on Disney's payroll. However, Squeak was born at Apple in 95-96, before any Disney involvement.

Re:Wasn't MOOcode based on Smalltalk?

[david.given]

I wrote a multiplayer web game in MOO-code; Stellation [sf.net]. (Now defunct. Server not running, web page very out of date, but the source is still available from CVS on Sourceforge.)

It's a nice language. A bit baroque in places, but it has lots of nice features if you're programming this kind of thing; persistance (never need to worry about storing your data on disk!); incremental updates (connect to the server and fiddle with the code while it's up and running and serving requests!); a nice threading model (cooperative multitasking with teeth --- your thread has complete control until it suspends, but if you wait too long the thread's killed)... The VM is sophisticated enough that the game server runs its own web server.

The language itself is sort-of garbage collected (parts are, parts aren't), object oriented with pure dynamic dispatch, has some very nice security measures which I didn't use in Stellation because I wasn't letting users program it, and generally behaves like a slightly gothic Smalltalk with C syntax. Very easy to get used to.

If you're interested, check it out. I was really rather pleased with that game, and at its peak I got a reasonable number of players. It needs redesigning from the ground up, but I've yet to find a VM that's quite as nice as LambdaMOO for doing it in.

(Anyone want to adopt it?)

Is Squeak your problem?

[BitwizeGHC]

Having installed Squeak on Windows, Linux, and Mac, I can say that I've never had a problem with Squeak.

There are two factors here, that I can see: Squeak, and Windows 2000. Which is the more reliable of the two? I think I know...

Re:ObQuote

[Tablizer]

"Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which could only have originated in California."

Only half right. It originated in Norway by the designers of Simula-67. However, the term perhaps may have been coined in California.

Re:There's no justice I tell you!

[baxissimo]

Is Ant better than SCONS?
http://ant.apache.org/ [apache.org]
http://www.scons.org/ [scons.org]

Seriously, I'm just curious. I've heard a lot more about SCONS than Ant. For instance Blender [blender.org] is switching over to a SCONS build system.