Joe Armstrong & Alan Kay - Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay

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Recommends lliamander · 2017-01 · on “What Happens to OO When Processors Are Free? (2015)”

> Erlang != OOP as imagined by Kay... as I understand Kay's intent. You should check out the video[0] of Joe Armstrong interviewing Alan Kay - it seemed to me that Erlang was in some respects closer to what Alan Kay intended for OOP than even smalltalk was. [0] [this video]

Recommends dpeck · 2019-04 · on “Joe Armstrong has died”

That is so sad, he was in his late 60s and it seemed like he had a lot of life left in him, talking about how software can get better and having a great (and sometimes snarky) outlook on the profession. Highly recommend his thesis (2003) and a few of his great interviews/presentations for anyone who isn’t familiar with Joe, it captures a lot of what he thought about and pushed for in his professional life. [LINK] [this video] [LINK] [LINK] I hope his family and friends can find some comfort in how much he was appreciated and admired in the development community.

Recommends gens · 2020-04 · on “Gleam: A statically typed language for the Erlang VM”

Concurrency.. the way i understand it, it is about making parts of the program run independent of each other and thus can run at the same time. But you might want to check out someone who knows better, like Rob Pike: [LINK] Yes, Erlang makes concurrent programs easier to write. Again it is better to listen to someone who knows more, like the creator of Erlang Joe Armstrong: [LINK] Any talk by him is great. Erlang, in how i see it, makes it easier to write concurrent programs because: 1. Parts of a program communicate with other parts by passing messages 2. Every variable is static, as in if you declare that A is 12 you can not change it to be 13 Joe Armstrong had a way of explaining these th

Recommends gens · 2020-05 · on “Single Writer Principle (2011)”

Checking out what Alan Kay has to say about it might help: [this video] The way i see it OOP is about encapsulating/bundling data and the code that processes that data into one "object", that is isolated from other objects. The objects could only "communicate" with other objects by sending "messages" (data/events/something). Personally i don't like OOP, and think that focusing on data and how it's processed is a better way forward (CSP and such). It's.. a complicated matter.

Recommends Rendello · 2021-11 · on “Ask HN: If OOP is about message passing, why not sender.send(receiver, message)?”

One sort-of exception is Erlang (and anything else that runs on the BEAM vm, like Elixir). It doesn't match Alan Kay's vision exactly, because the message passing is done a bit differently (for example it's asynchronous), but creator Joe Armstrong called it something like "the best of functional programming and OOP". If you come from C++, Java, or other "OOP" languages, and look at Erlang, it's completely different than what you expect. In Erlang, the "objects" are less like mutable structs and more like functional mini-programs that can create new programs, pass messages, and fail as you would expect. To get some perspective on both of their perspectives, here's "Joe Armstrong interviews Al

Recommends AceJohnny2 · 2025-05 · on “Alan Kay did not invent objects (2019)”

Indeed, here's a email from Alan Kay about how his perspective is about "messaging" between objects: [LINK] (edit: derp, this is directly cited in TFA) Also, I loved this interview/discussion between Kay & Joe Armstrong, inventor of Erlang, where the topic comes up again (because Erlang is also a lot about messaging between agents) [this video]

Recommends mempko · 2026-07 · on “A Love Letter to Object Orientation”

Thanks, I'll check it out! When I implemented messaging for Abject, I used the Erlang model. I also added P2P support so objects can talk across the network. There is this great discussion between Joe Armstrong and Alan Kay if you haven't see it. [this video] EDIT: Just checked your smalltalk implementation. Very cool! Do you remember the Open Croquet project in the early 2000s? Way ahead of it's time. I wonder if a modern version of that could work today now that we have good VR headsets.

Cites mpweiher · 2016-11 · on “Tutorial: Metacompilers Part 1”

Ahh..META II [1]. This is awesome. Was just mentioned again in the "Joe Armstrong interviewing Alan Kay" talk [2][3]. One of Alan's favourite papers. Joe: "Dan said if you look at this, you will lose a month of your life. And I did" Or words to that effect. Also the basis for OMeta[4]. I have to admit I've been avoiding it so far in order not to get diverted from architectural insights[5] but this may just be accessible enough to dive on in. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video] [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK] [5] [LINK]