Seminar with Alan Kay on Object Oriented Programming (VPRI 0246)

What people said

patterns · 2023-12 · Recommendation

I think this is a fair assessment. I agree that Smalltalk is by far not a complete solution to the problem of building and maintaining complex system but "only" an attempt. I found that message passing is an elegant approach to have interoperability on a very basic level. But when protocols and interactions between objects get more complex, it becomes more difficult retain control and comprehension of the evolving system, thus fundamentally better approaches and methods are needed than what is present in a typical Smalltalk system. You might be interested in watching Alan Kay's seminar on object-oriented programming, in which he sketches some ideas on how to modularize an OO system, notably, using a kind of specification language to describe the functions/needs of components and letting the underlying system figure out how to hook them up and deliver messages automatically (as opposed to the direct message passing style in traditional Smalltalks). The relevant part can be found here [1], but I found the entire talk worth watching, since a whole set of issues with OOP and Smalltalk (difficulties in finding and reusing components, weak generality) is being touched upon. Unfortunately, as far as I know, none of the critical ideas have been crystallized into a new kind of Smalltalk - which would be more focused on working on sets of components instead of individual objects/classes (or paraphrasing Alan Kay, making "tissues"). [1] [VIDEO]

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gambler · 2019-04 · Recommendation

Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: [LINK] If you want to see what "practical" OOP looked like in the 80s, this is a good video: [VIDEO]

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romaniv · 2025-07 · Reference

This video contains many serious misrepresentations. For example, it makes a claim that Alan Kay only started talking about message-passing only in 2003 and that it was a kind of backpedaling due the failures of the inheritance-based OOP model. That is a laughable claim. Kay had given detailed talks discussing issues of OOP, dynamic composition and message-passing in mid-80s. Some of those talks are on YouTube: [VIDEO] Also, earlier versions of Smalltalk did not have inheritance. Kay talks about this is his 1993 article on the history of the language: [LINK] Dismissing all of this as insignificant quips is ludicrous.

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