I think K.K. is referring to the writings of Alan Kay, who is pretty authoritative when it comes to Smalltalk. In his paper, The Early History of Smalltalk, published by the ACM in History of Programming Languages II (1993).
"My biology minor had focused on both cell metabolism and larger scale morphogenesis with its notions of simple mechanisms controlling complex processes and one kind of building block able to differentiate into all needed building blocks. The 220 file system, the B5000, Sketchpad, and finally Simula, all used the same idea for different purposes. Bob Barton, the main designer of the B5000 and a professor at Utah had said in one of his talks a few days earlier: "The basic principal of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power as the whole." For the first time I thought of the whole as the entire computer and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it up into little computers, as time sharing was starting to? But not in dozens. Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure? "
Online here: http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html
On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 1:37 AM, Benjamin L. RussellDekuDekuplex@yahoo.com wrote:
On Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:25:34 +0530, "K. K. Subramaniam" subbukk@gmail.com wrote:
Concepts in Squeak have their origins in biology rather than in computational math. The boundary between 'hardware' and 'software' is blurry. See the reading list at http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp particularly "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
Richard O'Keefe refutes this claim in his post [1] "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago," dated "2009-07-16 01:38:14 GMT," on the Haskell-Cafe mailing list (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329); _viz._:
Concepts in Squeak [a dialect and implementation of Smalltalk] have
their origins
in biology rather than in computational math....
That posting is wrong.
Smalltalk's roots are very firmly planted in Lisp, with perhaps a touch of Logo (which also had its roots in Lisp). The classic Smalltalk-76 paper even contains a meta-circular interpreter, which I found reminiscent of the old Lisp one. The "biological" metaphor in Smalltalk is actually a SOCIAL metaphor: sending and receiving messages, and a "social" model of agents with memory exchanging messages naturally leads to anthropomorphisms.
The other classic OO language, which inspired C++, which inspired Java, which inspired C#, is Simula 67, which has its roots in Algol 60. While Simula 67 was sometimes used for simulating biological processes, the main background was discrete event systems like factories and shops; there are no biological metaphors in Simula.
-- Benjamin L. Russell
[1] O'Keefe, Richard. "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 16 July 2009. 24 July 2009.
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329.
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