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HP Fires Father of OOP

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the hard-times dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Wow. Hewlett-Packard has disbanded its Advanced Software Research team and sent its leader, reknowned programmer Alan Kay, packing. From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: 'HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay. A founder of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Kay -- who once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- was instrumental in the development of the windowing GUI and modern object-oriented programming. He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out and his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him."

2 of 697 comments (clear)

  1. Not how things work by typical · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.' Maybe Apple will hire him.

    Or they might just wait until he comes up with something else revolutionary, swipe it, make it appealing to the masses, and sell it.

    And then Microsoft will probably steal *that* and make it appealing to businesses and get even richer.

    --
    Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
  2. Re:Favorite Alan Kay Quotation by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    I'm sure Mr. Kay will not have any problem finding a job, should he so desire one. Regardless, I wish him the best of luck.

    Except that for the cost of hiring the "father of Object Oriented Programming", you could hire a small army of Indian programmers. When will American programmers learn that they can't expect to keep their overpaid jobs? While being the father of OOP surely adds some "value" to any future employers, I can't expect that to be worth more than $5k or $6k a year.