> Interestingly, the OO model that Wirth and Gutknecht implemented in the Oberon system corresponds better to Kay's message-based vision than Smalltalk-80. Wirth arrived here not by trying to emulate biology, but by trying to avoid the V-Table.

That's interesting! what did they do that corresponded better?

Speaking of vtables, at Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration Bjarne Stroustrup also gave a fascinating talk after Alan Kay's, and they had some spicy back-and-forth discussion afterwards! Both call themselves Nygaard's heirs, anbd it was a delightful and respectful interplay between very different world views.

Kay came to Simula as a reader, turned it into Smalltalk, and later knew Nygaard and Dahl as colleagues. Stroustrup was taught by Nygaard in person, as a student at Aarhus, and then used Simula for his PhD.

Roughly: Stroustrup said he never took much from Smalltalk. What he took from Simula was the static part, compile-time guarantees and a direct map to hardware with zero-overhead abstraction, and C++ was never meant to be just an object-oriented language, since not everything is a class hierarchy or a virtual function. Kay argued that late binding pays for itself because the human is the slow part of an interactive system, and that static typing is a good idea applied prematurely. They agreed that the real job of an operating system or the internet is never to crash and never lose anything, and came at it from opposite ends: Stroustrup is working on guarantees against dangling pointers, out of range access, and uninitialized memory in C++, while Kay pointed out that Smalltalk protected every object dynamically.

Alan Kay's talk:

https://au.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=fe0...

Bjarne Stroustrup's talk:

https://au.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=fe0...

The discussion afterwards:

https://au.cloud.panopto.eu/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=fe0...

If you hate llm generated summaries then you can stop here and go watch the entire video yourself, but here are timestamps and summaries for people who don't have five hours to spare (although I highly recommend it -- I was watching it in real time when I witnessed the feedback performance between talks):

4:56:49: Stroustrup says he was never much inspired by Smalltalk. What he took from Simula was the static part: compile-time guarantees. "It would be nice to say yes, but to be honest, not much."

4:58:25: Stroustrup on garbage collection versus scope-based resource management (RAII): nobody has managed to combine them. Java's finalizers are his example, and somene mentions Lars Bak, "also from here" (Aarhus), says never use finalizers, they're evil.

5:00:24: Banter. Someone asks whether there's anything he likes about Smalltalk, and the reply is "Anything you like about me?"

5:00:47: Kay agrees reuse isn't a good reason for much, asks why people cling to old languages, and brings up the CrowdStrike crash taking down hospitals.

5:02:05: Stroustrup says CrowdStrike was a violated configuration rule, not a language problem. Programmers and managers are conservative and "confuse familiar with simplicity." He's not saying C++ is right for everything, and Python's all-dynamic approach is successful.

5:04 to 5:06: Kay says late-bound slowness pays for itself because humans are the slow part of interactive computing. Computing is held back by corporate legacy, and PARC was lucky to build all its own hardware and software.

5:07: An audience question about the next ten years. Kay says operating systems and the internet put you in a different seat of responsibility: the goal is never to crash and never to lose anything.

5:08:59: Stroustrup agrees, but says he doesn't control any operating system. He's working on guarantees in C++: no dangling pointers, no out-of-range access, no uninitialized memory.

5:09:55: Kay says typing is a really good idea, just premature in its static form. Smalltalk's dynamic typing protected every object.

5:10:34: Stroustrup says it's very hard to get hardcore developers to stop believing they can crash a system.

5:11:59 to 5:13:40: Kay says the Smalltalk image was a complete operating system, and that he made a living writing microcode. The field is guilty of not keeping up with the hardware. Stroustrup says he tried to talk hardware makers into adding support features, in his PhD, and failed.