TITLE: Yet Another Version of Alan Kay's Definition of "Object-Oriented" AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: June 19, 2014 2:11 PM DESC: ----- BODY: In 2003, Stefan Ram asked Alan Kay to explain some of the ideas and history behind the term "object-oriented". Ram posted Kay's responses for all to see. Here is how Kay responded to the specific question, "What does 'object-oriented [programming]' mean to you?":
OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things.Messaging and extreme late-binding have been consistent parts of Kay's answer to this question over the years. He has also always emphasized the encapsulated autonomy of objects, with analogy to cells from biology and nodes on the internet. As Kay has said many times, in his conception of the basic unit of computation is a whole computer. For some reason, I really like the way Kay phrased the encapsulated autonomy clause in this definition: local retention and protection and hiding of state-process. It's not poetry or anything, but it has a rhythm. Kay's e-mail mentions another of Kay's common themes, that most computer scientists didn't take full advantage of the idea of objects. Instead, we stayed too close to the dominant data-centric perspective. I often encounter this with colleagues who confound object-oriented programming with abstract data types. A system designed around ADTs will not offer the same benefits that Kay envisions for objects defined by their interactions. In some cases, the words we adopted for OO concepts may have contributed to the remaining bias toward data, even if unintentionally. For example, Kay thinks that the term "polymorphism" hews too closely to the standard concept of a function to convey the somewhat different notion of an object as embodying multiple algebras. Kay's message also mentions two projects I need to learn more about. I've heard of Robert Balzer's Dataless Programming paper but never read it. I've heard of GEDANKEN, a programming language project by John Reynolds, but never seen any write-up. This time I downloaded GEDANKEN: A Simple Typeless Language Which Permits Functional Data Structures and Coroutines, Reynolds's tech report from Argonne National Lab. Now I am ready to become a little better informed than I was this morning. The messages posted by Ram are worth a look. They serve as a short precursor to (re-)reading Kay's history of Smalltalk paper. Enjoy! -----