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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
I predict that Google announces that they hired him in a week.
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
Reminds me of the "Bad Idea Jeans" SNL commercial
the HP bio on Alan Kay
"but money is the God of Algiers & Mahomet their prophet." - Rich. O'Bryen June 8th 1786
"I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind."
- Alan Kay
I don't know if this is a true quotation, or is apocryphal, but it's good enough to throw around at random.
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.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Kay is the kind of people that have too much ideas and not enough time to research or implement all of them (in a good sense of course). That means he's got potential ideas lined up waiting for some CPU cycles to become available. You give him carte blanche over a talented team and he create amazing stuff. I'd be the ideal person to build an "Internet Plateform", whatever it is. I can tell what exists today is not "it" and barely registers as functional in his mind. I'd be surprised if he doesn't end at Google.
I just hope development on Croquet doesn't stall now, otherwise us cyberspace-lusting techno-hopefuls will just have to wait for the inevitable (but still hopefully far-off) day where you can open Word documents and Excel spreadsheets from inside World of Warcraft.
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...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.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
That is why the Squeak license still mentions Apple
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
On that basis, the rest of us still haven't caught up with him! Things like GUIs, portable computers, wireless networking, and the web are all steps towards the future he envisioned. But that future is still a long ways away.
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
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?
Actually, what they meant to say was "HP Invest." Just one letter. Simple mistake, really.
Actually actually, I think it meant to say "HP Invert", as in Rectal-Cranial Inversion, which is what HP has collectively accomplished with moves like this.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
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
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.
Actually, what they meant to say was "HP Invest." Just one letter. Simple mistake, really.
Actually actually, I think it meant to say "HP Invert", as in Rectal-Cranial Inversion, which is what HP has collectively accomplished with moves like this.
Fact: they meant to say "HP Invect" -- that is, to issue invective.
Examples:
"Fuck you, losers -- we're better off without you!"
And:
"HP Rules! U-S-A-!! U-S-A-!!," etc.
-kgj
-kgj
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.
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.
About seven years ago I was a sub-sub-contractor working on a project for HP. A minor style issue came up on the documents I was formatting style sheets for: should there be a hyphen here or not? When I asked my contact at HP, he said: "I'll have to ask the committee about that."
I thought: This company is doomed!
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
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."
I don't find this hard to believe at all. HP's not in the blue-sky R&D business, and hasn't been for many years now.
What I don't get, is why he ever went to HP in the first place.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This is the difference between a company and a business. A business is a company that has found its cash cow, and firmly opposes any further research or innovation that does not serve that golden calf. New technologies are particularly opposed, as they tend to change the business model, which requires the company to adapt (horrifying word to mba's btw, it requires thinking), to recreate the original, and beautiful, holy equilibrium, allowing the business to slowly move on, possibly growing into associated markets, without anything ever actually changing.
Technology is only good as long as it can be seen as an evolutionary step, and is almost exlcusively performed by the marketing department, leading to the terms "new and improved", and "version 2.0"(heh, or "XP").
Change is bad, Microsoft blew $5B on the Xbox project so far simply to keep sony from possibly threatening the windows empire with the ps2.
Fear change, go with the names you trust, these are not the droids you are looking for.
And the band played on.
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
But it's not a troll. It's a fact!
CS majors are smart people, but the US economy is dying for innovating marketing and business people to help them resell existing shit.
The only time I have seen US CS majors gain immediate value is when they go abroad. There are plenty of companies in China, India, HK, Canada, Australia that would love to get their hands on top CS majors from the US.
Wasn't OO invented in northern europe the mid 60's in the Simula language by a guy named something like Nygaard?
Table-ized A.I.
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For some interesting anecdotes involving Alan
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
HP stock dives when Lexmark sells 3 printers. Because HP is just a printing company.
HP stock dives when Dell changes their standard chassis color. Because HP is just a PC company.
HP stock dives when IBM does some new services campaign. Because HP is just a consulting company.
HP stock dives because they announce a new technology out of HP Labs. Because Dell doesn't have R&D, they save all that cash. HP is stupid for spending on that when they could just repaint Intel systems.
HP stock dove this week because somebody leaked that they'd lay off 25,000 people. When it ended up only being 14,500, HP just wasn't serious about cutting costs.
I am not saying that HP is fantastic, I am just saying that to call them just a PC company is silly. We all know that two articles from now (since there will be a dupe of this one before the next new article) it will be about printing, and everybody will say how HP is going to die since all they do is make printers...
It will be an interesting year for HP. By 6/1/06, the company could look completely different.
And one thing to consider, no computer seller is an engineering company any longer. Dell never was, Lenovo isn't going to be, Gateway isn't.
Agilent is the engineering half of HP.
My mom says I'm cool.