
Simula 50 years - aryehof
http://simula67.at.ifi.uio.no/50years/index.html
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todd8
My undergraduate thesis (1974) advisor was Dr. Barbara Liskov who was
designing CLU, which became a very influential research language. The first
thing she told me to do was to read a small book, _Structured Programming_ by
Dahl, Dijkstra, and Hoare. She particularly wanted me to read the chapter by
Dahl on Sumula-67.

Simula was an important contribution to the development of modern programming
languages, by way of Sumula -> CLU -> Alphard -> Ada -> Modula -> C++ -> Java,
and the many other connections back to Simula like Smalltalk.

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aryehof
Such an influential language today, yet so undiscussed.

It’s sad that so many assume that object-orientation started with Smalltalk.
In fact, objects, classes, sub-classing and virtual functions are from Simula.
Smalltalk’s biggest addition and contribution to object-orientation was the
encompassing design concept of Alan Kay “messaging”.

It is those features introduced in Simula that largely remain influential
today, while Smalltalk’s “messaging” concept is effectively obsolete in a
world of program design largely dominated by “data”.

~~~
scroot
Kay is fairly explicit in crediting Simula as an influence, even though he
coined the term OO during the Parc era.

One thing that's important to keep in mind is that Smalltalk was designed
specifically with personal computing in mind, while Simula wasn't. The real
shame here is that the academic and scientific languages won out over the more
holistic Smalltalk-like experience when it came to personal computing.
Consequentially, we now have these incredibly powerful laptops that emulate
PDPs and time sharing machines from four decades ago, that run WYSIWYG text
editors just as well as or even more slowly than they did two decades ago, and
that make it impossible to reason about the system in any meaningful way.
There are programmers and then there are users, and the division is strict.
Ain't nothing "personal" about it, really.

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timonoko
This was the first language which I learned after failing @ Fortran in 1970s.
We did not have easily accessible Simula, but we were using it as
specification language for traffic simulations, which it was originally
intented.

So when they tried to force me to adopting the "revolutionary C++" 20 years
later, I was less enthusiastic , which made the executives very unhappy.

