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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."

11 of 697 comments (clear)

  1. Read it while you can! by ak3ldama · · Score: 5, Informative

    the HP bio on Alan Kay

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    "but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
  2. Smalltalk by pthisis · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...is the antithesis of the Java B&D philosophy. It's an aggressively dynamically typed language, and is much more of a precursor to Python or Ruby than Java.

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    rage, rage against the dying of the light
    1. Re:Smalltalk by Concerned+Onlooker · · Score: 5, Informative
      It is also partially what Objective-C is based on. According to the wikipedia entry "the syntax for certain object-oriented features, including message-passing, is borrowed from Smalltalk."

      While you say "aggressively dynmically typed" you also remember you always have the option of statically typing.

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      http://www.rootstrikers.org/
  3. Kay already did work for Apple, by alangmead · · Score: 5, Informative
    In between his stints as a Chief Scientist at Atari and a Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering, he was an Apple Fellow. (his bio on O'Reilly.com has more info.)

    That is why the Squeak license still mentions Apple

  4. Alan Kay Videos explaning early GUI research by interrupt75 · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are some excellent videos on archive.org of Alan Kay explaining some of the early GUI projects (including Xerox and the early laptop "prototype") http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987 http://www.archive.org/details/AlanKeyD1987_2

  5. Re:What's the big fuss? by Dioscorea · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check out some of his presentations of open croquet before you say that (see e.g. here). He is bringing the kind of OpenGL graphics that gamers have got used to into the mainstream GUI. It is among the most innovative and forward-looking interface development I've seen. Do we really think we'll be dragging windows around a 2D desktop in 30 years time?

  6. alan kay - winner of some minor prize in CS by craig.larman · · Score: 5, Informative

    i can understand that it's really too trivial to have mentioned in his Bio intro, but Alan Kay also won some minor award recently -- think it's called the TURING AWARD. i can't imagine why anyone would want to employ such a slacker. http://internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/33425 11/ -craig

  7. Coined and invented are two different things by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wasn't OO invented in northern europe the mid 60's in the Simula language by a guy named something like Nygaard?

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    Table-ized A.I.
  8. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 4, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  9. Maybe Apple will hire him... by fbg111 · · Score: 4, Informative

    For some interesting anecdotes involving Alan

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  10. Re:Yet More HP Slogans by jcmunt · · Score: 5, Informative

    Proably wont win any karma for saying this but what exactly has Alan Kay done in like the last 20 years.

    Squeak http://www.squeak.org/
    Croquet http://opencroquet.org/
    eToys http://squeakland.org/