Alan Kay Receives ACM Turing Award 120
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:MVC too? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MVC too? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:MVC too? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sort of. It uses a secondary layer on top, "VisualWorks", the manages the interations between the models and the controllers and views. Then the UIBuilder builds to this structure. It makes it a lot easier to use. Technicaly it's down there but you don't have to worry about it much
MVP is a pretty good improvement over MVC
It's been awhile since I used VisualAge and they use something else, with a Bridge pattern thrown
Re:MVC too? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:MVC too? (Score:2, Informative)
That's PARC, for Palo Alto Research Center
Re:MVC too? (Score:2)
I invented the term 'object-oriented' and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.
-- Alan Kay
I invented the term! (Score:5, Funny)
A lot of the developers and managers at Apple were gathered around watching a presentation from someone about some "wonderful" new product that would save the world. All through the presentation, he had been stating that the product was "object-oriented" while he blathered on.
Finally, someone at the back of the room piped up:
"So, this product doesn't support inheritance, right?"
"that's right".
"And it doesn't support polymorphism, right?"
"that's right"
"And it doesn't support encapsulation, right?"
"that's correct".
"So, it doesn't seem to me like it's object-oriented".
To which the presenter huffily responded,
"Well, who's to say what's object-oriented and what's not?"
At this point the person replied,
"I am. I'm AlanKay and I invented the term."
Re:I invented the term! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:1)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:2)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:2)
the oberon system is pretty fun to play with, for those of you out there who like to play with new and funky languages, OSes and window systems. Like Squeak Smalltalk, it's a self-contained OS, with it's own widget set and windowing system that exists parallel to win32/x11/quartz, being blitted to one big window. A lot of fun to play with, although the stodgy Pascal-like language of Oberon itself is a bit too formal for me, and I prefer Squeak. But
Re:I invented the term! (Score:5, Funny)
...and my CS professor StephenKeckler was just awarded the GraceHopper award.
Are you an overworked sysadmin? Do you manually assign so many logins that you normalize all full names?
Re:I invented the term! (Score:1)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:2)
Re:I invented the (language)! (Score:4, Funny)
"Maybe they're ashamed of it!" quipped my friend, in reply.
Another (better informed) friend quickly pulled him aside and explained that Grace had been one of the prime movers in the design of Cobol.
Re:I invented the (language)! (Score:1, Insightful)
It was a great regret of hers that COBOL remained the state of the art for as long as it did. She never intended for it to become an entrenched obstacle to CS progress for 30 years.
Re:I invented the term! (Score:2)
Magical Microsoft Moments. (Score:5, Funny)
I've been attending the USENIX NT and LISA NT (Large Installation Systems Administration for NT) conference in downtown Seattle this week.
One of those magical Microsoft moments(tm) happened yesterday and I thought that I'd share. Non-geeks may not find this funny at all, but those in geekdom (particularly UNIX geekdom) will appreciate it.
Greg Sullivan, a Microsoft product manager (henceforth MPM), was holding forth on a forthcoming product that will provide Unix style scripting and shell services on NT for compatibility and to leverage UNIX expertise that moves to the NT platform. The product suite includes the MKS (Mortise Kern Systems) windowing Korn shell, a windowing PERL, and lots of goodies like awk, sed and grep. It actually fills a nice niche for which other products (like the MKS suite) have either been too highly priced or not well enough integrated.
An older man, probably mid-50s, stands up in the back of the room and asserts that Microsoft could have done better with their choice of Korn shell. He asks if they had considered others that are more compatible with existing UNIX versions of KSH.
The MPM said that the MKS shell was pretty compatible and should be able to run all UNIX scripts.
The questioner again asserted that the MKS shell was not very compatible and didn't do a lot of things right that are defined in the KSH language spec.
The MPM asserted again that the shell was pretty compatible and shouldwork quite well.
This assertion and counter assertion went back and forth for a bit, when another fellow member of the audience announced to the MPM that the questioner was, in fact David Korn of AT&T (now Lucent) Bell Labs--the author of the Korn shell.
Uproarious laughter burst forth from the audience, and it was one of the only times that I have seen a (by then pink cheeked) MPM lost for words or momentarily lacking the usual unflappable confidence.
Re:Magical Microsoft Moments. (Score:1)
He also said.. (Score:5, Funny)
No he did not (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No he did not (Score:2)
Re:No he did not (Score:2)
No, that word is also Norwegian! :-)
Original -- vindöga. Literally, Wind Eye.
(Since that time we Scandinavians have imported the French (?) word for windows. At least here in Sweden.)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:1)
ST does support single inheritance.
ST does support polymorphism.
ST mandates encapsulation.
Sounds pretty OO to me.
Re:I invented the term! (Score:1)
Re:I invented the term! (Score:1)
Nick Holonyak Jr., inventor of the LED (Score:2, Funny)
New generation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Surprising (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Surprising (Score:1, Informative)
What NYU is really like [seventeen.com]
Fuck CS. No one goes to NYU for academics.
Wasn't MOOcode based on Smalltalk? (Score:4, Interesting)
-P.M.
Re:Wasn't MOOcode based on Smalltalk? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Wasn't MOOcode based on Smalltalk? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?)
There's no justice I tell you! (Score:3, Informative)
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:There's no justice I tell you! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:There's no justice I tell you! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:There's no justice I tell you! (Score:1)
*weeps*
Re:There's no justice I tell you! (Score:5, Funny)
Thank goodness for Ant.
<reply tone="sarcastic" style="parody" effectiveness="probably low">
<conjunction value="Because"></conjunction>
<gerund value="programming"></gerund>
<preposition value="in"></preposition>
<acronym value="XML"></acronym>
<verb value="is"></verb>
<adverb value="much"></adverb>
<adverb value="less"></adverb>
<adjective value="awkward"></adjective>
</reply>
Re:There's no justice I tell you! (Score:1)
Wait! You didn't specify the various namespaces that your attributes come from, or provide a DTD or XSD so that I can read your document with a validating reader! You're just NOT LONG-WINDED ENOUGH to use XML!
Anyway, XML is merely the data format. I'm sure you could bolt a nicer data format onto Ant if you wanted, but the limitations of make are best addressed by using something modern.
What Ant's creator has to say about that (Score:1)
Re:There's no justice I tell you! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
ObQuote (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ObQuote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ObQuote (Score:5, Funny)
Re:ObQuote (Score:5, Funny)
C makes it easy to shoot (Score:1)
"C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do, it blows away your whole leg."
Re:ObQuote (Score:5, Funny)
- attributed to Edsger Dijkstra [wikipedia.org]
Re:ObQuote (Score:2, Interesting)
Only half right. It originated in Norway by the designers of Simula-67. However, the term perhaps may have been coined in California.
Re:ObQuote (Score:1)
Re:ObQuote (Score:1)
-Tom Cargill, C++ Journal, Fall 1990
Make! (Score:3, Funny)
Make! Just about time. We would be ants without it.
Dr. Stuart I. Feldman deserves the award but... (Score:3, Funny)
yes, it was a joke
Squeak? I guess I could use a new hobby. (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Re:Squeak? I guess I could use a new hobby. (Score:1)
Re:Squeak? I guess I could use a new hobby. (Score:2)
Squeak - old news (Score:2, Interesting)
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 - not so old after all (Score:5, Informative)
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:Squeak - old news (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Squeak is useful in education (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:1, Informative)
A similarly good choice for teaching maths would be lisp or forth.
My All Time Favorite Quote (Score:3, Insightful)
Misquoted. (Score:4, Informative)
"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.
Alan Kay is awesome (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
In case you didn't know (Score:3, Informative)
Simula is still used and there is a research facility [simula.no] named after it.
Re:In case you didn't know (Score:1)
The Simula people already won the award years earlier IIRC.
A Great Squeak Demo (Score:1)
Re:A Great Squeak Demo (Score:2, Informative)
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5
*sigh*
Alan Kay Etech 2003 presentation (Score:5, Informative)
Someone to tell (Score:2)
He should be higly pleased (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't this news item 17 years late? (Score:1)
Re:Isn't this news item 17 years late? (Score:1)
Congratulations! (Score:1)
Dr. Kay's deep interest in children and education (Score:1)
Re:I HATE Dr. Stuart I. Feldman !!! (Score:3, Funny)
Is Squeak your problem? (Score:3, Interesting)
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...