To WIMC
This is an interesting example of an ever increasing web disease -- that is: expressing mere opinions without foundations or checking. This one is easy, because there is a readily available "Early History of Smalltalk" that the ACM got me to write in 1993. So why wouldn't people just type "history of smalltalk" into Google? (I don't know and I haven't been able to figure this out).
The very first hit finds this paper. (This one is not the best version of it because someone just scanned the doc I wrote to get an HTML version and left out lots of the pictures. But in looking at it, it seems to answer this question very straightforwardly -- and that answer was given by "someone who was actually there" and had a hand in the invention of Smalltalk, rather than people with opinions from the side.)
What is wrong? Why is mere opinion so dominating discussions held on the easiest medium there has ever been that can provide substantiations with just a little curiosity and work? Is the world completely reverting to an oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?
As anyone who would be willing to read a few pages of writing will be able to see, there were a number of important influences on the invention of objects and then the invention of Smalltalk itself.
Objects a. The first two influences I saw were pure mathematics and molecular biology (these were my two majors in college starting in 1958). b. The second two I saw (in the very early 60s) were procedural abstractions of date structures in the Burroughs 220 file system for the Air Force, and especially the Burroughs B5000 computer hardware. c. "In the air" in the ARPA community in 1966 was the intention to invent a new kind of distributed network with "no central control or switching". d. The next two I saw (in 1966 in the very same week) were Sketchpad and Simula. Sketchpad was the dominant metaphor, but I had to see Simula a few days later to understand just how great an idea Sketchpad was.
These seven influences got me to thinking about one abstraction that was indeed like a biological cell on the one hand and an entire computer on the other which could be universally used at all levels of scales in both software and hardware to "model anything" (including all the old inconvenient things computing was using). This is where "message passing" took hold as something stronger in concept and more loosely coupled and scalable system-wise.
Somewhat asked me what I was doing and I said "object oriented computing". (I should have thought much harder about the choice of terms)
Smalltalk a. In 1968 I saw Seymour Papert, Wally Feurzig, et al., and LOGO and got interested in the idea of a computer and computer environment for children. Right around that time I read Marvin Minsky's incredible book "Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines" and he made a kind of Lisp from Goedel numbers that was really beautiful. This got me to look at Lisp again and finally understand what was truly great about it. In 1970 I was at the Stanford AI Project on a postdoc and I started playing around with various kinds of interpreters.
b. In 1971 at PARC we had the wonderful funding to be able to try to really make all this happen, and I started thinking about a programming language for children that would not be harder to learn than LOGO but which would be object oriented and also use Carl Hewitt's ideas in PLANNER as a way of communicating in forms that could be used for deduction (this was somewhat like the object-oriented Prologs that were done much later).
c. In 1972, while working on all this "the bet" happened and I spent a few weeks just making the simplest possible OOP language using McCarthy's techniques first employed for Lisp in the late 50s. This is in the Appendix of the "Early History" paper, and it is what Dan Ingalls implemented in a month to get a first running version of Smalltalk.
I most definitely still think of OOP at its best as being "biological".
Best wishes (and happy reading)
Alan
From: Benjamin L. Russell DekuDekuplex@Yahoo.com Date: 24. Juli 2009 03:37:04 GMT-03:00 To: beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms Reply-To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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. --Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^ _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
To Alan Kay,
Thank you very much for your detailed clarification. I had actually already started reading your paper [1] (at http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html#29) before Richard O'Keefe's response mentioned earlier [2] (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329), but hadn't yet had enough time to read through it at that point.
Just for reference, here is how this misunderstanding apparently occurred:
1) On the date "Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:25:34 +0530," K. K. Subramaniam replied to me in the thread "Re: Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms" [3] (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-June/006270.html) on the squeak-beginners mailing list as follows:
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.
2) On the date "Mon Jul 13 08:35:06 EDT 2009," Bulat Ziganshin wrote in the thread "[Haskell] 20 years ago" [4] (see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2009-July/021487.html) on the Haskell mailing list as follows:
Industrial programmers often think that functional programming is "unnatural" and cannot be mastered by most of them. But 20 years ago they thought the same about OOP
The first widespead OOP system was a Turbo Pascal 5.5, released 1989.
3) To correct his misunderstanding about which widespread OOP system came first, I responded as follows [5] (see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2009-July/021489.html):
Just for the record, Turbo Pascal was preceded by a *pure* object-oriented language, Smalltalk [1], as described below:
The Smalltalk language, which was developed at Xerox PARC (by Alan Kay and others) in the 1970s, introduced the term object-oriented programming to represent the pervasive use of objects and messages as the basis for computation.... Smalltalk and with it OOP were introduced to a wider audience by the August 1981 issue of Byte magazine.
[...]
[1] "Object-oriented programming - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." _Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia._ 13 July 2009. 14 July 2009. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming.
4) Ziganshin then replied as follows [6] (see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2009-July/021490.html):
TP was a first OOP system sold in hundreds of thousands of copies. it was "OOP for the masses" and its manual reflects what masses thought about OOP those times - just the same that they think about FP now. you can replace OOP with FP in the manual text i cited and read it as modern text :)
5) The discussion continued for a few more posts, until one user then asked in private e-mail to have the topic moved to the Haskell-Cafe mailing list. Discussion continued there, with Ketil Malde re-introducing the topic, as follows [7] (http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-July/064185.html):
[redirected from haskell@]
[...]
Objects contain all kinds of hidden state and dependencies, and the sheer unpredicatability of it all is the reason for the anthropomorphics - it a symptom of a disease, not a desirable quality.
6) Dissatisfied with his use of the term "disease" in relation to anthropomorphics, I responded as follows [8] (see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-July/064235.html):
Although I don't necessary agree with your choice of the term, I find it interesting that you should use the biological term "disease"; according to a post [1] entitled "Re: Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms," by K. K. Subramaniam, dated "Mon, 29 Jun 2009 11:25:34 +0530," on the squeak-beginners mailing list (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-June/006270.html),
Concepts in Squeak [a dialect and implementation of Smalltalk] have
their origins
in biology rather than in computational math.... See the reading list at http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp particularly "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins.
7) This is when Richard O'Keefe entered the thread, claiming that Subramaniam's above-mentioned post was incorrect, as follows [2] (again, see http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2009-July/064270.html):
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.
At this point, I considered responding that Smalltalk was in fact rooted in biology, so I skimmed your paper [1] for the term "LISP." However, I then came across such explanations as the following, which led me to think that O'Keefe was correct (at the end of section "II. 1967-69--The FLEX Machine, a first attempt at an OOP-based personal computer"):
The biggest hit for me while at SAIL in late '69 was to really understand LISP. Of course, every student knew about car, cdr, and cons, but Utah was impoverished in that no one there used LISP and hence, no one had penetrated thye mysteries of eval and apply. I could hardly believe how beautiful and wonderful the idea of LISP was [McCarthy 1960]. I say it this way because LISP had not only been around enough to get some honest barnacles, but worse, there wee deep falws in its logical foundations. By this, I mean that the pure language was supposed to be based on functions, but its most important components---such as lambda expressions quotes, and conds--where not functions at all, and insted ere called special forms. Landin and others had been able to get quotes and cons in terms of lambda by tricks that were variously clever and useful, but the flaw remained in the jewel. In the practical language things were better. There were not just EXPRs (which evaluated their arguments0, but FEXPRs (which did not). My next questions was, why on earth call it a functional language? Why not just base everuything on FEXPRs and force evaluation on the receiving side when needed? I could never get a good answer, but the question was very helpful when it came time to invent Smalltalk, because this started a line of thought that said "take the hardest and most profound thing you need to do, make it great, an then build every easier thing out of it". That was the promise of LiSP and the lure of lambda--needed was a better "hardest and most profound" thing. Objects should be it.
That paragraph, together with the meta-circular interpreter given in the appendix, gave me the mistaken impression (at first) that O'Keefe was correct.
After reading your response, I then looked through your paper again, and it seems that you had probably intended to emphasize the following paragraphs (in the "Introduction"), instead:
Smalltalk's design--and existence--is due to the insight that everything we can describe can be represented by the recursive composition of a single kind of behavioral building block that hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages. Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology....
In computer terms, Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing "computer stuff" into things each less strong than the whole--like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages--each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computer all hooked together by a very fast network. Questions of concrete representation can thus be postponed almost indefinitely because we are mainly concerned that the computers behave appropriately, and are interested in particular strategies only if the results are off or come back too slowly.
The difficulty is that the paper, as a whole, deals with influences from both LISP and biology, and without perusing the paper, it is easy to get a misconception as to which is the more important influence. This is most likely what gave O'Keefe the misconception that Smalltalk was rooted in LISP instead of biology.
-- Benjamin L. Russell
[1] Kay, Alan C. "The Early History of Smalltalk." Cambridge, Massachusetts: _History of Programming Languages: The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages_ (1993): 69-95. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=154766.155364&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=45415434&CFTOKEN=84716013. Also available at http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html#29.
[2] O'Keefe, Richard. "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 16 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61329.
[3] Subramaniam, K. K. "Re: Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms." The Beginners Archives. Squeak.org. 29 June 2009. 27 July 2009. http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-June/006270.html.
[4] Ziganshin, Bulat. "20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general. Gmane. 13 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17354.
[5] Russell, Benjamin L. "Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general. Gmane. 14 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17356.
[6] Ziganshin, Bulat. "Re: Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general. Gmane. 14 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/17357.
[7] Malde, Ketil. "Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 14 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61243.
[8] Russell, Benjamin L. "Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 15 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61293.
On Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:50:35 -0700 (PDT), Alan Kay alan.nemo@yahoo.com wrote:
To WIMC
This is an interesting example of an ever increasing web disease -- that is: expressing mere opinions without foundations or checking. This one is easy, because there is a readily available "Early History of Smalltalk" that the ACM got me to write in 1993. So why wouldn't people just type "history of smalltalk" into Google? (I don't know and I haven't been able to figure this out).
The very first hit finds this paper. (This one is not the best version of it because someone just scanned the doc I wrote to get an HTML version and left out lots of the pictures. But in looking at it, it seems to answer this question very straightforwardly -- and that answer was given by "someone who was actually there" and had a hand in the invention of Smalltalk, rather than people with opinions from the side.)
What is wrong? Why is mere opinion so dominating discussions held on the easiest medium there has ever been that can provide substantiations with just a little curiosity and work? Is the world completely reverting to an oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?
As anyone who would be willing to read a few pages of writing will be able to see, there were a number of important influences on the invention of objects and then the invention of Smalltalk itself.
Objects a. The first two influences I saw were pure mathematics and molecular biology (these were my two majors in college starting in 1958). b. The second two I saw (in the very early 60s) were procedural abstractions of date structures in the Burroughs 220 file system for the Air Force, and especially the Burroughs B5000 computer hardware. c. "In the air" in the ARPA community in 1966 was the intention to invent a new kind of distributed network with "no central control or switching". d. The next two I saw (in 1966 in the very same week) were Sketchpad and Simula. Sketchpad was the dominant metaphor, but I had to see Simula a few days later to understand just how great an idea Sketchpad was.
These seven influences got me to thinking about one abstraction that was indeed like a biological cell on the one hand and an entire computer on the other which could be universally used at all levels of scales in both software and hardware to "model anything" (including all the old inconvenient things computing was using). This is where "message passing" took hold as something stronger in concept and more loosely coupled and scalable system-wise.
Somewhat asked me what I was doing and I said "object oriented computing". (I should have thought much harder about the choice of terms)
Smalltalk a. In 1968 I saw Seymour Papert, Wally Feurzig, et al., and LOGO and got interested in the idea of a computer and computer environment for children. Right around that time I read Marvin Minsky's incredible book "Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines" and he made a kind of Lisp from Goedel numbers that was really beautiful. This got me to look at Lisp again and finally understand what was truly great about it. In 1970 I was at the Stanford AI Project on a postdoc and I started playing around with various kinds of interpreters.
b. In 1971 at PARC we had the wonderful funding to be able to try to really make all this happen, and I started thinking about a programming language for children that would not be harder to learn than LOGO but which would be object oriented and also use Carl Hewitt's ideas in PLANNER as a way of communicating in forms that could be used for deduction (this was somewhat like the object-oriented Prologs that were done much later).
c. In 1972, while working on all this "the bet" happened and I spent a few weeks just making the simplest possible OOP language using McCarthy's techniques first employed for Lisp in the late 50s. This is in the Appendix of the "Early History" paper, and it is what Dan Ingalls implemented in a month to get a first running version of Smalltalk.
I most definitely still think of OOP at its best as being "biological".
Best wishes (and happy reading)
Alan
From: Benjamin L. Russell DekuDekuplex@Yahoo.com Date: 24. Juli 2009 03:37:04 GMT-03:00 To: beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org Subject: [Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms Reply-To: "A friendly place to get answers to even the most basic questions about Squeak." beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org
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. --Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^ _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
Below is a message I posted to correct Richard O'Keefe's misunderstanding in understanding the significance of biology as one of the origins of Smalltalk [1] (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718):
Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your refutation [1] (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html); _viz._:
I most definitely still think of OOP at its best as being "biological".
[1] Kay, Alan. "[Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms." The Beginners Archives. Squeak.org. 24 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html.
Nevertheless, O'Keefe now still insists that Smalltalk did not originate in biology [2] (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749); _viz._:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:35:09 +1200, in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe "Richard O'Keefe" ok@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:
On Jul 27, 2009, at 6:30 PM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your refutation [1] (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html) ; _viz._:
If you read carefully what he wrote there, it doesn't actually contradict what I said. (For what it's worth, I _have_ read a good deal of Alan Kay's writings.)
Molecular biology may very well have been an influence on >Alan Kay<, but there are no traces of it in >Smalltalk<. The concepts of >Smalltalk< have their roots in Lisp, including the original version using nil as false, and the meta-circular interpreter.
Sketchpad and Simula also have no trace of biology in them.
As for the claim that Smalltalk had its roots in Lisp, this is not my opinion. It's straight from the horse's mouth. Visit
http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_IV.html whose title is "The first real Smalltalk", and you will read this paragraph:
"I had orignally made the boast because McCarthy's self-describing LISP interpreter was written in itself. It was about "a page", and as far as power goes, LISP was the whole nine-yards for functional languages. I was quite sure I could do the same for object-oriented languages plus be able to do a resonable syntax for the code a loa some of the FLEX machine techiques." [Errors in the page.]
So clearly Alan Kay _was_ influenced by Lisp, and the initial Smalltalk-72 implementation _was_ influenced by the Lisp meta-circular interpreter.
While we're on that page, here are the six core principles:
- Everything is an object [Where's the biology in that? Rocks are objects.]
- Objects communicate by sending and receiving messages (in terms of objects) [Where's the biology in that? Sounds more like the telephone system. And when organisms send messages to other organisms, those messages are not themselves organisms, although that might make a neat gimmick for a science fiction story.]
- Objects have their own memory (in terms of objects) [Many organisms have memory. But their memories are not themselves organisms. Again that might make a nice science fiction gimmick, and Brin's hydrogen breathers in the Uplift series come close. Not in THIS biology though.]
- Every object is an instance of a class (which must be an object) [Maybe here's the biology? But no, Simula 67 had single-inheritance classes, with never a trace of biology. There's certainly no biology-talk in the Simula Common Base manual that I can find. Again, in THIS biology, a taxon is not itself an organism, so if anything, Smalltalk is contradicting biology.]
- The class holds the shared behavior for its instances (in the form of objects in a pogram list) [Errors in the page. Where's the biology here? Organisms behave, but their behaviour isn't made of organisms held in another organism. Class as site of shared behaviour is straight Simula (and of course other sources).]
- To eval a program list, control is passed to the first object and the remainder is treated as its message [Does that look like biology to you?]
A PDF of the whole thing is http://www.smalltalk.org/downloads/papers/SmalltalkHistoryHOPL.pdf
But how important is that paper anyway? (1) It's by Alan Kay. (2) It's his official history of Smalltalk. (3) It actually says on the second page "I will try to show where most of the influences come from."
It's true that the abstract speaks of "a more biological scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior", but that's basically _it_ for biology, if we are to believe Kay, and even then, "its semantics are a bit like having thousands of and thousands of comptuers all hooked together by a very fast network" and "Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibnitz" (bringing us neatly back to Haskell (:-)).
We read "The biggest hit for me while at SAIL in late '69 was to _really understand_ Lisp".
By the way, Haskell programmers should really appreciate the anecdote on page 13 about programming odds_evens x = odds x ++ evens x where odds [] = [] odds (x:xs) = x : evens xs evens (_:x:xs) = x : evens xs evens _ = []. It took him about 5 seconds to do about that way, while it took Allen Newell "30 minutes to not quite solve".
At any rate, the paper which is supposed to trace "most of the influences" doesn't link even *one* idea in Smalltalk to biology. The influences are other programming languages, notably Lisp, Simula, and the ever-famous Sketchpad system, philosophy, programming, computer networks, ... As for the "biological" nature of message passing, the paper says (p50) "An extemporaneous talk by R. S. Barton at Alta ski lodge (1968) about computers as communication devices and how everything one does can easily be portrayed as sending messages to and from, was the real genesis of the current version of SMALLTALK."
Biology?
I repeat, this is not MY interpretation or history. My claim was solidly based on what Alan Kay himself wrote.
I could continue to try to correct him, but now other members there are beginning to question the relevance of the thread to the topic of discussion there (Haskell).
Any suggestions on a good way to resolve his misunderstanding?
-- Benjamin L. Russell
[1] Russell, Benjamin L. "Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 27 July 2009. 29 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718.
[2] O'Keefe, Richard. "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 28 July 2009. 29 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749.
I don't think there is a misunderstanding. There is disagreement. You don't correct disagreement.
Alan Kay feels his influence was from biology (and other things, including LISP).
Richard finds flaws in the analogy.
No misunderstanding.
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Benjamin L. RussellDekuDekuplex@yahoo.com wrote:
Below is a message I posted to correct Richard O'Keefe's misunderstanding in understanding the significance of biology as one of the origins of Smalltalk [1] (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718):
Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your refutation [1] (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html); _viz._:
I most definitely still think of OOP at its best as being "biological".
[1] Kay, Alan. "[Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms." The Beginners Archives. Squeak.org. 24 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html.
Nevertheless, O'Keefe now still insists that Smalltalk did not originate in biology [2] (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749); _viz._:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:35:09 +1200, in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe "Richard O'Keefe" ok@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:
On Jul 27, 2009, at 6:30 PM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your refutation [1] (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html) ; _viz._:
If you read carefully what he wrote there, it doesn't actually contradict what I said. (For what it's worth, I _have_ read a good deal of Alan Kay's writings.)
Molecular biology may very well have been an influence on >Alan Kay<, but there are no traces of it in >Smalltalk<. The concepts of >Smalltalk< have their roots in Lisp, including the original version using nil as false, and the meta-circular interpreter.
Sketchpad and Simula also have no trace of biology in them.
As for the claim that Smalltalk had its roots in Lisp, this is not my opinion. It's straight from the horse's mouth. Visit
http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_IV.html whose title is "The first real Smalltalk", and you will read this paragraph:
"I had orignally made the boast because McCarthy's self-describing LISP interpreter was written in itself. It was about "a page", and as far as power goes, LISP was the whole nine-yards for functional languages. I was quite sure I could do the same for object-oriented languages plus be able to do a resonable syntax for the code a loa some of the FLEX machine techiques." [Errors in the page.]
So clearly Alan Kay _was_ influenced by Lisp, and the initial Smalltalk-72 implementation _was_ influenced by the Lisp meta-circular interpreter.
While we're on that page, here are the six core principles: 1. Everything is an object [Where's the biology in that? Rocks are objects.] 2. Objects communicate by sending and receiving messages (in terms of objects) [Where's the biology in that? Sounds more like the telephone system. And when organisms send messages to other organisms, those messages are not themselves organisms, although that might make a neat gimmick for a science fiction story.] 3. Objects have their own memory (in terms of objects) [Many organisms have memory. But their memories are not themselves organisms. Again that might make a nice science fiction gimmick, and Brin's hydrogen breathers in the Uplift series come close. Not in THIS biology though.] 4. Every object is an instance of a class (which must be an object) [Maybe here's the biology? But no, Simula 67 had single-inheritance classes, with never a trace of biology. There's certainly no biology-talk in the Simula Common Base manual that I can find. Again, in THIS biology, a taxon is not itself an organism, so if anything, Smalltalk is contradicting biology.] 5. The class holds the shared behavior for its instances (in the form of objects in a pogram list) [Errors in the page. Where's the biology here? Organisms behave, but their behaviour isn't made of organisms held in another organism. Class as site of shared behaviour is straight Simula (and of course other sources).] 6. To eval a program list, control is passed to the first object and the remainder is treated as its message [Does that look like biology to you?]
A PDF of the whole thing is http://www.smalltalk.org/downloads/papers/SmalltalkHistoryHOPL.pdf
But how important is that paper anyway? (1) It's by Alan Kay. (2) It's his official history of Smalltalk. (3) It actually says on the second page "I will try to show where most of the influences come from."
It's true that the abstract speaks of "a more biological scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior", but that's basically _it_ for biology, if we are to believe Kay, and even then, "its semantics are a bit like having thousands of and thousands of comptuers all hooked together by a very fast network" and "Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibnitz" (bringing us neatly back to Haskell (:-)).
We read "The biggest hit for me while at SAIL in late '69 was to _really understand_ Lisp".
By the way, Haskell programmers should really appreciate the anecdote on page 13 about programming odds_evens x = odds x ++ evens x where odds [] = [] odds (x:xs) = x : evens xs evens (_:x:xs) = x : evens xs evens _ = []. It took him about 5 seconds to do about that way, while it took Allen Newell "30 minutes to not quite solve".
At any rate, the paper which is supposed to trace "most of the influences" doesn't link even *one* idea in Smalltalk to biology. The influences are other programming languages, notably Lisp, Simula, and the ever-famous Sketchpad system, philosophy, programming, computer networks, ... As for the "biological" nature of message passing, the paper says (p50) "An extemporaneous talk by R. S. Barton at Alta ski lodge (1968) about computers as communication devices and how everything one does can easily be portrayed as sending messages to and from, was the real genesis of the current version of SMALLTALK."
Biology?
I repeat, this is not MY interpretation or history. My claim was solidly based on what Alan Kay himself wrote.
I could continue to try to correct him, but now other members there are beginning to question the relevance of the thread to the topic of discussion there (Haskell).
Any suggestions on a good way to resolve his misunderstanding?
-- Benjamin L. Russell
[1] Russell, Benjamin L. "Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 27 July 2009. 29 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718.
[2] O'Keefe, Richard. "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 28 July 2009. 29 July 2009.
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749.
Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^
Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
On Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:57:22 +0200, David Mitchell wrote:
I don't think there is a misunderstanding. There is disagreement. You don't correct disagreement.
Alan Kay feels his influence was from biology (and other things, including LISP).
Richard finds flaws in the analogy.
No misunderstanding.
+1
Only disagreement and lots of "... in Smalltalk ..." missing from the listing of the six core principles' POV.
And thank you very much Ben for writing this all up. I love it :)
/Klaus
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 12:38 AM, Benjamin L. RussellDekuDekuplex@yahoo.com wrote:
Below is a message I posted to correct Richard O'Keefe's misunderstanding in understanding the significance of biology as one of the origins of Smalltalk [1] (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718):
Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your refutation [1] (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html); _viz._:
I most definitely still think of OOP at its best as being "biological".
[1] Kay, Alan. "[Newbies] Re: Smalltalk Data Structures and Algorithms." The Beginners Archives. Squeak.org. 24 July 2009. 27 July 2009. http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html.
Nevertheless, O'Keefe now still insists that Smalltalk did not originate in biology [2] (see http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749); _viz._:
On Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:35:09 +1200, in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe "Richard O'Keefe" ok@cs.otago.ac.nz wrote:
On Jul 27, 2009, at 6:30 PM, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
Incidentally, just for the record, in response to my forwarding your claim, Alan Kay, the inventor of Smalltalk, just refuted your refutation [1] (see http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/beginners/2009-July/006331.html) ; _viz._:
If you read carefully what he wrote there, it doesn't actually contradict what I said. (For what it's worth, I _have_ read a good deal of Alan Kay's writings.)
Molecular biology may very well have been an influence on >Alan Kay<, but there are no traces of it in >Smalltalk<. The concepts of >Smalltalk< have their roots in Lisp, including the original version using nil as false, and the meta-circular interpreter.
Sketchpad and Simula also have no trace of biology in them.
As for the claim that Smalltalk had its roots in Lisp, this is not my opinion. It's straight from the horse's mouth. Visit
http://www.smalltalk.org/smalltalk/TheEarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk_IV.html whose title is "The first real Smalltalk", and you will read this paragraph:
"I had orignally made the boast because McCarthy's self-describing LISP interpreter was written in itself. It was about "a page", and as far as power goes, LISP was the whole nine-yards for functional languages. I was quite sure I could do the same for object-oriented languages plus be able to do a resonable syntax for the code a loa some of the FLEX machine techiques." [Errors in the page.]
So clearly Alan Kay _was_ influenced by Lisp, and the initial Smalltalk-72 implementation _was_ influenced by the Lisp meta-circular interpreter.
While we're on that page, here are the six core principles: 1. Everything is an object [Where's the biology in that? Rocks are objects.] 2. Objects communicate by sending and receiving messages (in terms of objects) [Where's the biology in that? Sounds more like the telephone system. And when organisms send messages to other organisms, those messages are not themselves organisms, although that might make a neat gimmick for a science fiction story.] 3. Objects have their own memory (in terms of objects) [Many organisms have memory. But their memories are not themselves organisms. Again that might make a nice science fiction gimmick, and Brin's hydrogen breathers in the Uplift series come close. Not in THIS biology though.] 4. Every object is an instance of a class (which must be an object) [Maybe here's the biology? But no, Simula 67 had single-inheritance classes, with never a trace of biology. There's certainly no biology-talk in the Simula Common Base manual that I can find. Again, in THIS biology, a taxon is not itself an organism, so if anything, Smalltalk is contradicting biology.] 5. The class holds the shared behavior for its instances (in the form of objects in a pogram list) [Errors in the page. Where's the biology here? Organisms behave, but their behaviour isn't made of organisms held in another organism. Class as site of shared behaviour is straight Simula (and of course other sources).] 6. To eval a program list, control is passed to the first object and the remainder is treated as its message [Does that look like biology to you?]
A PDF of the whole thing is http://www.smalltalk.org/downloads/papers/SmalltalkHistoryHOPL.pdf
But how important is that paper anyway? (1) It's by Alan Kay. (2) It's his official history of Smalltalk. (3) It actually says on the second page "I will try to show where most of the influences come from."
It's true that the abstract speaks of "a more biological scheme of protected universal cells interacting only through messages that could mimic any desired behavior", but that's basically _it_ for biology, if we are to believe Kay, and even then, "its semantics are a bit like having thousands of and thousands of comptuers all hooked together by a very fast network" and "Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibnitz" (bringing us neatly back to Haskell (:-)).
We read "The biggest hit for me while at SAIL in late '69 was to _really understand_ Lisp".
By the way, Haskell programmers should really appreciate the anecdote on page 13 about programming odds_evens x = odds x ++ evens x where odds [] = [] odds (x:xs) = x : evens xs evens (_:x:xs) = x : evens xs evens _ = []. It took him about 5 seconds to do about that way, while it took Allen Newell "30 minutes to not quite solve".
At any rate, the paper which is supposed to trace "most of the influences" doesn't link even *one* idea in Smalltalk to biology. The influences are other programming languages, notably Lisp, Simula, and the ever-famous Sketchpad system, philosophy, programming, computer networks, ... As for the "biological" nature of message passing, the paper says (p50) "An extemporaneous talk by R. S. Barton at Alta ski lodge (1968) about computers as communication devices and how everything one does can easily be portrayed as sending messages to and from, was the real genesis of the current version of SMALLTALK."
Biology?
I repeat, this is not MY interpretation or history. My claim was solidly based on what Alan Kay himself wrote.
I could continue to try to correct him, but now other members there are beginning to question the relevance of the thread to the topic of discussion there (Haskell).
Any suggestions on a good way to resolve his misunderstanding?
-- Benjamin L. Russell
[1] Russell, Benjamin L. "Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 27 July 2009. 29 July 2009. http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61718.
[2] O'Keefe, Richard. "Re: Re: [Haskell] Re: 20 years ago." gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe. Gmane. 28 July 2009. 29 July 2009.
http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/61749.
Benjamin L. Russell / DekuDekuplex at Yahoo dot com http://dekudekuplex.wordpress.com/ Translator/Interpreter / Mobile: +011 81 80-3603-6725 "Furuike ya, kawazu tobikomu mizu no oto." -- Matsuo Basho^
Beginners mailing list Beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners
beginners@lists.squeakfoundation.org
-
Alan Kay -
Benjamin L. Russell -
David Mitchell -
Klaus D. Witzel