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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."
Doesn't the model-view-controller pattern originally come from smalltalk?
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
SteveBurbeck once told me this AlanKay story from his days at Apple.
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."
In tribute to the pinnacle of achievement realized as a result of his invention, Mr. Holonyak will also be receiving a commemorative license plate frame with blinking LED marquee lights.
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.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It is surprising that the chose not to honor Martin Davis of NYU, since so many OOP ideas are implicit in his work.
-P.M.
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.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Reminds me of the "Magical Microsoft Moments" story:
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.
"I invented the term ObjectOriented, and C++ isn't what I had in mind"
I invented the term Object-Oriented Programming, and I can tell you I didn't have C++ in mind Alan Kay, OOPSLA 1997.
Make! Just about time. We would be ants without it.
please give him only half the prize money for having tabs as integral part of make syntax :-))
yes, it was a joke
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 and this quick tutorial, 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".
"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.
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.
Kristen Nygaard invented object-oriented programming together with Ole-Johan Dahl at the Norwegian Computing Center.
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 built (first) in squeak, now also available in the descendant to ParcPlace smalltalk (now Cincom Smalltalk)
Also of interest is croquet, a virtual 3d environment. I saw a live demo 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 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.
"Perspective is worth 50 points of IQ. -Alan Kay
If you forget about the future, the future will forget about you.
You'll love whitespace then, I reckon. Unfortunately it isn't Object Oriented so I'm not on topic :-(
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.
Simula is still used and there is a research facility named after it.
Here's a presentation at Etech 2003 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.
non-linky address:
http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/5
*sigh*
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...
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
"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.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
"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.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.
Since we can assume a Turing Award is an award capable of modelling all other awards, which makes it functionally equivalent to a Nobel Prize, Oscar, Grammy and Bronze Swimming Certificate.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a