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HP Fires Father of OOP
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."
HP Invent ---- Isn't that hard without inventors ?
This is my opinion based on what little I know and understand of the rumors and lies Thanks, Randal
People wonder why no one is going into CS anymore.
If you honestly think he'll be struggling to find a well paying job elsewhere you're deluding yourself. Just because large floundering corporations are laying off good CS people doesn't mean much. Mostly what it means is that HP obviously doesn't have any long term vision anymore, and are probably very much on the way out.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
Comment removed based on user account deletion
HP doesn't need innovators like Kay. HP is totally into innovating new ways to make money off of printer consumables, and that isn't an expertise that Kay brings to the table.
HP's downfall started to happen as soon as they started selling tons of LaserJet printers.
From there, HP seemed to take a little break and brought nothing new to market. Instead of making great new products, they kept on milking the same printer lines until they got old, crusty, and expensive to operate. They tried to do the same thing with their PC line. They unloaded or failed to focus on their other product lines.
I haven't bought an HP product in years. My ex-girlfriend bought an HP inkjet printer, but it failed quickly and the consumables were ridiculously expensive. It just didn't seem like an HP quality product to me.
So HP fired Alan Kay? That's good for Alan. Because who wants to work for an ink-n-toner company?
I'll post instead of mod, but I think that /. should nix the HP logo. The entity known as "HP" is currently undeserving of any relation to the Hewlett-Packard legacy of computing, innovation, research, precision devices, calculators!, and, yes, printers. "HP" is really just a printer company now. Change the /. icon to a LaserJet or something, but "Hewlett-Packard" it's not. Okay, I have more b33r to drink...
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Looks like Hurd is turning HP into a lean machine to be as focused on products and price as Dell currently is.
Sigh...Dell does what it does pretty well, but they are definitely not a company known for much imagination or innovation. They generally follow after someone else has blazed the path, a strategy that must fail once all of the true innovators have been eliminated. We don't really need any more Dells. If HP becomes just like Dell, then why should I buy from them? I might as well buy from Dell.
HP can still succeed, but they need to do so by being HP. Efficiency is good, but not at the expense of the good things that make HP stand out from the crowd and create future opportunities. I think farmers say that you shouldn't eat the seed corn.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
HP laid off 15k workers, but is currently heavily recruiting engineers in India and China. Just take a look at the Job section on hp.com.
HP has obviously abandoned the USA and it's time we abandon this dying company.
People wonder why no one is going into CS anymore.
Actually employment stats bottomed in 2002 and have been picking up since. At the same time a lot of people are making the same mistake you did, which is reading too much in to the random firing.
In sum the overall picture is something like IT employment down 10% but rising back up, CS enrolment down 50% and falling.
Guess what that translates into? A shortage of CSers four years from now.
If you honestly think he'll be struggling to find a well paying job elsewhere you're deluding yourself
I'm not worried about him, I'm more worried about my own ass. If even large corporations don't need CS visionaries anymore, then CS is no longer a hot field. Thus, your main choices for a job are: coding boring business apps all day, or supporting boring and poorly written business apps all day. Real CS jobs (ones which depend on talent, rather than a "skillset" of buzzwords) are getting very difficult to come by.
HP has a fairly long history of getting rid of geniuses. Doubtlessly there are a few who remain well employed, but rejecting Wozniak and Jobs' idea for a personal computer has to rank with one of the all-time mistakes in corporate America, up there with the Coca-Cola Company not buying Pepsi when it had the chance, IBM giving a small software company a monopoly on its PC operating system, etc.
I suspect that somehow HP will muddle through, just as IBM did. They're still a good company, despite the damage Fiorina caused them with their expensive and ill-considered buyout of Compaq Computers.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
This is a troll.
CS visionaries are smart people who work in a particular field. Every field of work has the same type of "real jobs" you are describing. From CS, to plumbing, to glass blowing! And that's from personal experience.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Dell doesn't do anything creative. They buy cheap parts and build cheap computers with them on a large scale. They have thinner margins than some competitors, but they make it up in volume and crappy support. It's not like their prices are particularly low or anything (unless they have a good combination of rebates, which can only be redeemed using small claims court).
Nothing particularly creative, it's a very straightforward and unimaginative approach that is mainly successful due to the general lack of innovation in the computer industry.
I'm assuming this is a troll.
I'm going to make that assumption, because the only other option is too depressing.
Unless you'd like a future where everything is basically owned and run--to a far greater extent than it already is--by a very small number of tremendously rich individuals, corporations are a good thing. This is because very few people actually have the resources by themselves to bankroll significant and long-lasting ventures: scientific, industrial, or otherwise.
To do big things, like build factories, operate supertankers, run airlines, you need a lot of money. Much more than any one sane person would be willing to put up. This is why corporations exist: they allow people to pool their resources, while mitigating risk. Without the shelter from liability that corporations offer, no one would invest in them. Without the great pools of capital that corporations provide, a whole lot of things that we enjoy and make life more enjoyable would disappear.
Maybe you want to live in a world without corporations, but count me out of it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
A corporation is essentially an artificial entity that cannot exist without government fiat. It's the modern day version of a chartered company. What makes a corporation legally different from a private business is that the former is a legal "person". The results on the actual owners of the corporation (shareholders) being totally absolved of responsibility for the actions of the corporation. Their share price may plummet if the company does something stupid, but they themselves are not personally responsible for their property.
That's the legal aspect of corporations, and justification enough to get rid of them. But it also introduces a subtler monkeywrench into the economy: encouraging stock ownership as an investment, which severely dilutes company ownership. There are so many owners, millions in many cases, that it's impossible for the owners to exercise control, even if they wanted to. So they elect a board of directors instead, who hires executives to actually run it.
All in all, corporations are unnatural entities. But the fix is easy, and doesn't need a new constitutional ammendment. Just rescind the current laws of incorporation. But don't expect it anytime soon. Like copyright and patents, incorporation is too useful of a fiction to abolish. You'll be fought tooth and nail from every side. Who are you going to go to for legal assistance, some non-profit corporation?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
You don't hire Alan Kay to write code, you numbnut.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
They where Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl working at Norwegian Computing Center. At least Nygaard have taught many young norwegians object oriented programming at the univeristy of Oslo. I think they still use Simula there. I was lucky enough to attend a course with him once. Nygaard told me the story of how they came up with OOP himself.
They both died in 2002.
Lately I have heard more than once that Alan Kay is the father of Object Oriented programming. But it seems he is the father of dynamic object oriented programming. At least that is what Wikipedia say. Why is the world already forgetting Nygaard and Dahl?
Guys, guys, be aware of your history. The 'virtual machine' has been around since at least 1966. The concept of a virtual machine which was the common host to multiple languages has been around since at least 1977. Automatic memory management and garbage collection has been around since I was a small child.
Don't get me wrong. I like Java. I make my living out of Java. But Sun didn't 'invent' Java. Nothing in the conception of the Oak (later Java) platform was either new or innovative. Java was a nice, clean implementation of some well known programming techniques which got a good marketing push behind it.
As for C# - indeed the whole .net platform - it is a very straight copy of Java. Virtually nothing - from the syntax of the C# language to many of the opcodes of the virtual machine - has changed. These things are not 'innovations' or 'inventions'. They're technology as usual; building on and refining what went before in quite small increments.
By contrast, Smalltalk genuinely was innovative. It was the first fully object oriented language. It used a virtual machine, but was the first virtual machine language which had a JIT. Don't devalue inventions. Inventions (especially in software) are rare; there have been only about half a dozen genuine software inventions since 1960, and Smalltalk definitely counts as one of those.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Well, let's see. Your particular solutions to the (admittedly growing) problem of corporatism in America appear to involve using force to prevent people from joining together for profit-making purposes.
He's right, you are putting up straw men because he said nothing of the sort. He specically said the the current limited-liability for-profit corporate model is broken because the current legal framework for those corps requiring profit maximization not only encourages unethical behaviour but requires often self-destructive short-term focus.
While he did put up non-profit corps as an alternative, there are others: for-profit partnerships for example. The point he argues is that the profit motive should not be divorced from responsibility for a corp's actions.
One alternative, which is certainly possible with current information systems, is to change the definition of shareholder liability in a limited-liability corporation to be capped at the share value (during ownership) or (post-divestment) all income obtained from that corporation, via both capital gains and dividends, for the result of any actions taken during the period of share ownership, regardless of whether a person is still a shareholder or has sold their shares. So you can't be a CEO/President (or majority shareholder supporting said executive), run a company into the ground through unethical practices, hide it while making a killing by selling shares through an overinflated stock price, and escaping the liability for those actions when the pigeons come home to roost.
And if you're a small shareholder (or pension manager), you'll have a lot more interest in making sure you have company directors that are providing good oversight of the executive team, instead of rubber stamping their golf club buddies.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
My exact thoughts...
Get real, they were hardly groundbreaking languages. Java basically wanted to move into that OOPish, procedural language niche C++ occupied, without having to deal with C++'s steep learning investment, and to be a bit more RAD-like in usage, hence its interpreter based origins. The only thing that could be described as cutting edge would be its compiler, but that was hardly an original idea. Microsoft was even less original, they just wanted the same things Java aimed for, and usurp Java from the "backoffice".
Its like saying C was an incredibly original language. No, it was based heavily on the procedural language theory; PASCAL (ugh) could be considered genuinely original. C was implemented to be a practical language; addressing the computing limitations of machines in its day, and be "simple" enough to make it portable over different architectures.
Java & C# was not research; they were marketing driven language designs that catered to less talented programmers. Much like how programmers abandoned assembler programming for COBOL and FORTRAN. (though FORTRAN was a language breakthrough.) Its wasn't the HP research group's job to do technical marketing. Its not RESEARCH. Its the job of the CTO/CEO to decide what research projects to fund, and thus the research direction. But its not to have a distinct payoff in five years. That's not research.
Its like chess. You use the computers to number crunch the advantageous plies. But that's not advancing chess theory. (Good) Human players aren't supposed to be looking only 4 moves, and then go to the next 4 moves. Humans are supposed to evaluate sets of moves in an abstract manner, looking to make the kill 20 moves in advance. That's research.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Also, if it were that easy, you don't think all their competitors would do it?
The industry has been heading in that direction for the past 20 years or so. Dell's only achievement is finding a decent balance between price and quality.
Yeah. Thanks in large part to....Dell! They're one of a handfull of companies who have continually found ways to push margins. And when most companies start to get soft, they found ways to continually pound their competitors. That's the thing - as cheap as computers are now, they're still finding ways to make them cheaper.
They got lucky. Part of the reason they are successful is because they never innovate and spend as little as possible on engineering and R&D.
I'm guessing you're not in the business world, because crippling every single one of your competitors in an amazingly competitive industry doesn't happen through luck.
Basically, I'm pretty sure you just have a set idea of what innovation is, and that happens to coincide with pushing the technical envelope. However, the guy who invents it doesn't get it into homes. That would be the guy who figures out to make it cheaper. Dell has been that guy for the last 20 years. If it were up to IBM, PCs would still cost over $1000, which is what the bottom of the line PC cost 13 years ago when I got my first.
People like that are what keep alive your internal corporate culture.
Those are the guys that tell you where no to set your foot because they did so before and found there was a bear trap.
If you seriously are saying that HP can't find a place on their company for a guy that shaped a good part of software development carried out during the last 20 years, worldwide, then you and HP need to sit down and pause because you both are lunatics.
People like these are few per generation. I am sure other more enlightened companies (like the ones mentioned on the thread), that are actually shapping the IT world will snap him if he still feels like working.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.