Grandfather of Smalltalk gets Turing Award [ACM Announces 2005 A.M. Turing Award Winner]

Dan Ingalls Dan at SqueakLand.org
Thu Mar 2 18:47:15 UTC 2006


"Klaus D. Witzel" <klaus.witzel at cobss.com>  wrote...

>as you can see from the below, a grandfather of Smalltalk (Peter Naur: Algol, Backus-Naur-Form BNF) receives the 2005 Turing award.

With all due respect to Peter Naur and his significant contributions to computer science, I'm not entirely comfortable with the characterization "Grandfather of Smalltalk".  He is certainly grandfather of a lot of current programming technology but, as one who was present at the birth of Smalltalk, I can say that our entire focus was to provide a fundamentally different computing model from that of Algol.  Alan Kay, in his History of Programming Languages article gives an excellent account of the genetic material that went into Smalltalk, and I would recommend that article to anyone who is interested in Squeak's intellectual lineage.

	- Dan



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