Fun_People Archive
12 Feb
objectively speaking

Date: Sun, 12 Feb 95 13:07:40 PST
From: Peter Langston <psl>
To: Fun_People
Subject: objectively speaking

[For some reason this makes me think of Marshall McLuhan...  -psl]

Forwarded-by: "pardo@cs.washington.edu" <pardo@cs.washington.edu>
Forwarded-by: rfc@oghma.Eng.Sun.COM
Forwarded-by: Shing Kong <shing.kong@eng.sun.com>
Forwarded-by: Wendell Craig Baker <wbaker@splat.baker.com>
From: "strick@yak.net" <strick@yak.net>

A friend at apple <brat@apple.com> tells an anecdote of a presentation
that someone from [creator of PASCAL] Wirth's research project LILITH
was giving at Apple.

LILITH is a "dynamic" programming environment, in the style Tim was
describing.  Like it's got browsers and classes and instances and
inspectors and interpreted-like class definitions and looks a lot like
the Smalltalk environment does.

At the end of the talk, someone from the audience stands up and asks
something to this effect:

 -- You claim your system is object-oriented

	-- Yes

 -- but it doesn't have late binding

	-- right

 -- and it doesn't have garbage collection

	-- right

 -- and it doesn't have ...

and he goes on to accuse the system of not having a lot of the
things that Smalltalk has.

 -- then it's not really object-oriented after all, is it?

	-- well, who's to say what object-oriented is?

 -- I am.   I'm Alan Kay, and I coined the term.

© 1995 Peter Langston