Nothing you said contradicts my comment at all. I said "he's not really the inventor of object-orientation as we currently think of it." What we currently think of as object-orientation is not what he invented. I don't see what's controversial about this, since he said exactly this in the interview, and I'm not understanding the downvotes to -3. The second part of my comment was expressing basically the same sentiment as this comment, which was not downvoted into oblivion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4229788
> It sounds like his conception of "objects" is a more user-facing thing; an object is something you see on your screen and can interact with and manipulate by programming. This view blurs the line between users and programmers. I'm not sure this is a terribly realistic model for how normal people want to interact with computers.
Which misrepresents his contribution rather badly.
KAY: We didn't use an operating system at PARC. We didn't have applications either.
BINSTOCK: So it was just an object loader?
KAY: An object exchanger, really. The user interface's job was to ask objects to show themselves and to composite those views with other ones.
BINSTOCK: You really radicalized the idea of objects by making everything in the system an object.
KAY: No, I didn't. I mean, I made up the term "objects." Since we did objects first, there weren't any objects to radicalize. We started off with that view of objects, which is exactly the same as the view we had of what the Internet had to be, except in software.
I realize that objects in Smalltalk were not all graphical, but this concept of objects as graphical entities seems to be near and dear to his heart.
The interview does not discuss Kay's contributions in any depth. You have misunderstood them as a result of making weak inferences and not doing any further research.
You're right that I don't know his work that well and probably extrapolated too much from this interview. I just get a little irritated at people (even smart, famous people) who criticize successful projects like the Web or Wikipedia for not being good enough, or inferior to their own work, without acknowledging that their success in the marketplace shows that they must have done something right.
I'm glad he's working on STEPS; I'm eager to see him push the boundaries of what is possible, and if it succeeds, it will validate his ideas. But Smalltalk and Squeak have been around for decades, and yet the Web and Wikipedia are orders of magnitude more popular. So why does he have to bash their creators as "amateurs" or "lacking imagination" when their ideas have caught hold in a way that his work has not? What does he have to back up this criticism? Sure, a lot of the ideas from Smalltalk and his early work on object-oriented design have influenced other programming languages, but he himself says that the way in which object-oriented design evolved runs counter to his vision, not in support of it.
