Ehem. Object oriented programming wasn’t invented by Alan Kay, it was invented by Ole Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard. Kristen Nygaard - A.M. Turing Award Laureate
Haha. This reminds me of something KN once told me: When applying for funding it was made abundantly clear to him that advances in programming languages was something Norwegians were supposed to import from the US, and could he please find another topic to concentrate his efforts on
Sincerely, it seems to me that the two more sane paragraphs from the link are the two last ones, the rest really seems like just angry ranting.
Personally, I think we all need a NewDefinitionForOo. None of the DefinitionsForOo proposed, including Nygaard and Dahl, is completely satisfactory. The N&D definition is more descriptive of programming styles then of languages. You can write OO code in CeeLanguage, but nobody would claim C to be an OO language just 'cause you can simulate a VeeTable with a struct full of function pointers. The AlanKay definition seems to change over time (unlike Nygaard and Dahl, Kay is still alive and thus able to publish), but parts of it seem contrived to deliberately exclude C++. OTOH PolymorphismEncapsulationInheritance has a very strong C++ bias; certainly proponents of WeaklyEncapsulated languages like PythonLanguage or CommonLisp have grounds to object.
Arguments over whether Nygaard/Dahl, IvanSutherland, or AlanKay has the stronger claim to “own” the term OO miss the point completely. Scientific jargon and terminology belongs to the scientific community; not to the first guy in a white coat to coin a particular phrase. The definition of OO is owned by us all; not by AlanKay or anyone else. If OO were defined to mean what AlanKay says, no more and no less, then I submit that a new term should be coined and the phrase “object-oriented” relegated to the status of marketing buzzword. Given that the phrase OO has such an incredible amount of currency, it would be a bad thing were that to happen.
Hi Henrique,
I’m wondering that wiki.c2.com is still alive: for me it is one of the ways to time warp to the ancients. Given the mean live time of an internet site it is precious. Take it with a grain of salt.