

“Points of View”, Essays in Honour of Alan Kay - yarapavan
http://vpri.org/pov/

======
davidgrenier
I have no clue what Alan Kay did, except to foist the horror of Object
Oriented programming to the world.

But here, I conceded, I don't know. Please enlighten me.

~~~
badsock
Other than the huge list you can get from Wikipedia, the one that blew my mind
recently was STEPS, a research project he was involved in a few years ago:

[http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf](http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf)
[PDF]

~~~
corysama
Here's a long vid of Kay showing off the fruits of STEPS and doing his job to
remind us that because we forgot about the work done in the 50s-70s, we've
spent the last 40 years rediscovering it and are only recently starting to
catch back up.

[https://vimeo.com/82301919](https://vimeo.com/82301919)

It's important to note that he is giving his presentation using STEPS' custom
productivity suite; running on STEPS' custom OS; both of which were compiled
using STEPS' custom languages and custom compilers all the way down to the
assemblers. And, the whole package (OS, compilers and all) totals well under
100K lines of code with no external, non-STEPs code introduced.

~~~
davidgrenier
I had seen that video before... I found it upsetting as most of it was
bragging and ranting, am I the only one who noticed?

There was no material in that video that anyone could use and following the
above article
([http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html](http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html))
also was written by Kay himself (which I haven't read yet but will do)... I'm
starting to wonder whether the reputation is self made.

