Sure! Basically the part about “why do we need apps? [Or even an OS]” aligns strongly with Alan’s vision in many of his talks. He strongly believed in the power of software objects, and designing a system that acted the same as it did within a single machine or interacting with millions of foreign ones. All with objects exchanging pure messages
I remember as a teenager being excited - for about a day! - when I first came across object-oriented programming - well, Smalltalk and Simula. I thought message passing would be asynchronous with every object having a virtual thread. When I found out that flow of control passes right into the target object, I remember feeling so disappointed. Perhaps because I sensed I'd spend the rest of my life inventing what I actually wanted!
You can't achieve what you describe with synchronous comms over the network, whereas with state-based async comms, you can get closer to the ideal of local and remote objects being seen the same by the user.
But, yes I liked the idea of a language that was also the OS.
You might want to check out polymorphic identifiers and storage combinators.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2508168.2508169?cid=81316491227
https://2019.splashcon.org/details/splash-2019-Onward-papers/7/Storage-Combinators
String Alan Kay vibes :)
Hi Srini, thanks for the comment. Would you elaborate a little on this note?!
Sure! Basically the part about “why do we need apps? [Or even an OS]” aligns strongly with Alan’s vision in many of his talks. He strongly believed in the power of software objects, and designing a system that acted the same as it did within a single machine or interacting with millions of foreign ones. All with objects exchanging pure messages
I remember as a teenager being excited - for about a day! - when I first came across object-oriented programming - well, Smalltalk and Simula. I thought message passing would be asynchronous with every object having a virtual thread. When I found out that flow of control passes right into the target object, I remember feeling so disappointed. Perhaps because I sensed I'd spend the rest of my life inventing what I actually wanted!
You can't achieve what you describe with synchronous comms over the network, whereas with state-based async comms, you can get closer to the ideal of local and remote objects being seen the same by the user.
But, yes I liked the idea of a language that was also the OS.