Seminar with Alan Kay on Object Oriented Programming (VPRI 0246)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as primary-source evidence of what Kay meant by objects, which resembled services and message passing rather than modern class-based OOP.
What it is
A long recorded seminar in which Alan Kay discusses object-oriented programming, probably from the mid-1980s. He covers the original idea of objects, messaging and the work done at Xerox.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2017 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends gambler · 2019-04 · on “Correctness – A paradigm for sustainable software development”
Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: [LINK] If you want to see what "practical" OOP looked like in the 80s, this is a good video: [this video]
Recommends patterns · 2023-12 · on “Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)”
I think this is a fair assessment. I agree that Smalltalk is by far not a complete solution to the problem of building and maintaining complex system but "only" an attempt. I found that message passing is an elegant approach to have interoperability on a very basic level. But when protocols and interactions between objects get more complex, it becomes more difficult retain control and comprehension of the evolving system, thus fundamentally better approaches and methods are needed than what is present in a typical Smalltalk system. You might be interested in watching Alan Kay's seminar on object-oriented programming, in which he sketches some ideas on how to modularize an OO system, notably,
Cites romaniv · 2017-12 · on “A pattern language for microservices”
I'm watching some OOP videos from mid-eighties right now. Can't shake the feeling that the original notion of OOP was solving the same problems as microservices try to solve today, but with far more elegance and more coherent theoretical framework. (Example: [this video] )
Cites romaniv · 2018-01 · on “The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018”
>Can we extend that logic to classes or interfaces? This was one of the main ideas behind the original definition of OOP. The original notion of "object" was very similar to our current notion of "service": [this video] Objects received messages, including messages sent over the network. There was not supposed to be a clear distinction between local and remote services - by design. A lot of inter-computer stuff could be/was handled transparently.
Cites gambler · 2020-10 · on “Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)”
Some of the ideas that were translated to reality are covered here: [this video] Some of them never got fully translated to reality at Xerox because of various reasons (e.g. memory limitation of hardware at the time). This is worth a read: [LINK]
Cites patterns · 2023-07 · on “Synit – A Reactive Operating System”
That's interesting. Thanks for the paper. I skimmed through it, but I did not get every detail, since it's been a long time I worked with languages like ML or Haskell and my formal background is a bit rusty at the moment. I do like the premise that, if I understood correctly, (1) you want to specify your computations with the most suitable representation(s) and you want them to be inter-operable. Also, (2) I find it interesting how the tension between pattern matching on explicit representations and abstract data types with information hiding can be reconciled. On a less formal side, the Personal Information Environment done at Xerox PARC, extended Smalltalk with perspectives, which addresse
Cites ly3xqhl8g9 · 2023-07 · on “Twitter has officially changed its logo to ‘X’”
An "everything app" is just an operating system. There is nothing to picture, we've been having them since the 1950s [1]. We could imagine some new way of operating over systems: for instance the Alan Kay original meaning of object-orientedness [2], or instead of a compiled binary to have some stable diffusion model + large language model which hallucinates the OS on the go [3]. But that's not what the quantifiably greediest person on the planet has in mind, by "everything app" they just mean "everything must be controlled by me, not by you". [1] [LINK] [2] [this video] [3] [LINK]
Cites andrekandre · 2025-05 · on “Alan Kay did not invent objects (2019)”
> His messages are directed to specific objects, whereas in a biological system, enzymes and the like are dumped into the bloodstream indiscriminately without a specific target. he actually goes into this in one of his (many) talks where he explains what some next steps might be for objects to "sense their environment" and message into the ether so-to-speak very similar to how you describe [0] [0] [this video] (he starts talking about that around 12 mins)