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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."
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.
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.
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.