ACM Queue - A conversation with Alan Kay

This has been around for a while but I hadn't seen it: an interview with Alan Kay, the creator of Smalltalk, talking about programming language evolution, Java and how he wishes things were different. It contains many interesting insights into a very smart man's brain.



We looked at Java very closely in 1995 when we were starting on a major set of implementations, just because it's a lot of work to do a viable language kernel. The thing we liked least about Java was the way it was implemented. It had this old idea, which has never worked, of having a set of paper specs, having to implement the VM (virtual machine) to the paper specs, and then having benchmarks that try to validate what you've just implemented, and that has never resulted in a completely compatible system.


via acm Queue

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