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Comment by alankay1

"More or less" ... I can see that it's hard after decades of "data-centric" perspectives to think in terms of "computers" rather than "data", and about semantics rather than pragmatics. It's not "data contains procedures" but that objects are (a) semantically computers, and are impervious to attack from the outside (a computer has to let an attack happen via its own internal programming), and (b) what's inside can be anything that is able to deal with messages in a reasonable way. In Smalltalk, these are more objects (there are only objects in Smalltalk). The way the internals of typical Smalltalk objects are organized could be done better (we used several schemes, but all of them had variables and methods (which were also objects).

So "2" is not "data" in Smalltalk (unfortunately, it is in Java, etc.)

We had planned that the interior of objects should be an "address space of objects" because this is a better and more recursive way to do modularization, and to allow a different inter-viewing scheme (we eventually did some of this for the Etoys system for children about 20 years ago). But the physical computers at Parc were tiny, and the code we could run was tiny (the whole system in the Ted Nelson demo video was a little over 10,000 lines of code for everything). So we stayed with our top priority: to make a real and highly interactive system that was very comprehensive about what it and the user could do together.

parent alankay1 9 years ago

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