I have attached Alan Kay's note to the Squeak list on meaages and
messaging below. Notice that Alan considers messaging to be far more
fundamental and important to Smalltalk than objects. My personal view is
that one can conceptually derive object oriented programming (and all
its related details) from the general concept of messaging -- that a
message can then be mapped to a machine level subroutine once everything
has been resolved is merely an implementation detail relevant to current
"normal" computer architectures, not a fundamental relation.

-- Dwight

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Subject:        Re: prototypes vs classes was: Re: Sun's HotSpot
   Date:        Fri, 9 Oct 1998 21:40:35 -0700
   From:        Alan Kay <alank at wdi.disney.com>

Folks --

Just a gentle reminder that I took some pains at the last OOPSLA to try
to remind everyone that Smalltalk is not only NOT its syntax or the
class library, it is not even about classes. I'm sorry that I long ago
coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets many people to
focus on the lesser idea.

The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of
Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's something that was never quite
completed in our Xerox PARC phase). The Japanese have a small word -- ma
-- for "that which is in between" -- perhaps the nearest English
equivalent is "interstitial". The key in making great and growable
systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than
what their internal properties and behaviors should be. Think of the
internet -- to live, it (a) has to allow many different kinds of ideas
and realizations that are beyond any single standard and (b) to allow
varying degrees of safe interoperability between these ideas.

If you focus on just messaging -- and realize that a good metasystem can
late bind the various 2nd level architectures used in objects -- then
much of the language-, UI-, and OS based discussions on this thread are
really quite moot. This was why I complained at the last OOPSLA that --
whereas at PARC we changed Smalltalk constantly, treating it always as a
work in progress -- when ST hit the larger world, it was pretty much
taken as "something just to be learned", as though it were Pascal or
Algol. Smalltalk-80 never really was mutated into the next better
versions of OOP. Given the current low state of programming in general,
I think this is a real mistake.

[....snip....]
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