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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."
I predict that Google announces that they hired him in a week.
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.
...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
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?
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.
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
HP Indebt?
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
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.
HP Inept?
require "something.clever";
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.
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/
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.