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NetMageSCW • today at 7:53 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

I got to meet Brad Cox at college when he came to visit one of my professors (who I worked with after hours). I find it interesting that instead of the objects as tiny computers of Kay he thought of software ICs and then pulled from Smalltalk to implement those concepts in Objective-C, but in the simplest way possible (almost just combining the two side-by-side) as opposed to Stroustrup being more heavily influenced by Similar (especially as he was actually building simulations) and extending C into objects to gain performance that Simula didn’t have.


Replies

twoodfin • today at 10:03 PM

People naturally get hung up on the syntax and the interop story with existing popular languages, but it’s the object model differences between Smalltalk, Objective-C, Self, C++… that really matter.

ref: https://www.abebooks.com/9780201834543/Object-Model-Lippman-...

kencausey • today at 8:34 PM

s/Similar/Simula/

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