Alan Kay  wrote:
>
> One of his [Mitchel Resnick's] very interesting opinions about the
problems he observed
> was that they didn't seem to be so much about "concurrency being
> hard", but that it was quite difficult for students of most ages
> (even high school students) to be able to take the point of view of
> one of the little particles and to think about what it could see and
> do. This "taking a different point of view other than your own" was a
> centerpiece of some of Piaget's work. In theory, this is supposed to
> get easier as you get older, but it also seems to be something that
> has to be learned, and many don't learn it. The students had a kind
> of god-like, from their POV, way of looking at the world -- much like
> programmers who start off with simple algorithms munging
> datastructures. This doesn't scale well. In good OOP, the programmer
> should take the POV of the object in its environment, and help the
> object become self-sufficient, productive and robust. This way of
> programming really opens the doors to concurrency.
>

I saw Kristen Nygaard a couple weeks ago and he was talking about his
experiences prior to Simula. He was building simulations for the Norwegian
military and said he would build the simulation thinking if I was a tank
what would I be able to do, what would I know, and so on. The fact that he
used the first person when referring to simulation objects led to a
discussion. My impression was that he thought it was so natural to use the
first person that he didn't see why it was worth pointing out. I wonder if
he didn't take this first person viewpoint whether he still would have
co-invented the first object-oriented programming language.

And I wonder if we should always write comments in first person...

Best,

-ken kahn ( www.toontalk.com )