"Unfortunately, inheritance — though an incredibly powerful technique — has turned out to be very difficult for novices (and even professionals) to deal with." Alan Kay, The Early History of Smalltalk, page 82
That's taken from a section which reflects on introducing programming to children in the summer of '73 —
In part, what we were seeing was the "hacker phenomenon", that for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it natural.
… it is likely that this area is more like writing than we wanted it to be. Namely, for the "80%", it really has to be learned gradually over a period of years in order to build up the structures that need to be there for design and solution look-ahead.
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Here's how that Alan Kay quote is used in The Big OOPs —
13:47 -- It's because 10 years earlier, he was already saying he kind of soured on it. He's like, inheritance was like really powerful, but people just didn't know how to use it. Novices and experts apparently both couldn't use it, right. It was just uh you know, it's really good, but no one can figure out how to use it, I guess. Uh so that's a little bit weird.
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Not "kind-of-soured on it" one page later —
There were a variety of strong desires for a real inheritance mechanism from Adele and me, from Larry Tesler, who was working on desktop publishing, and from the grad students. page 83
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Not "kind-of-soured on it" but wanting a "comprehensive and clean multiple inheritance scheme" —
A word about inheritance. … By the time Smalltalk-76 came along, Dan Ingalls had come up with a scheme that was Simula-like in it's semantics but could be incrementally changed on the fly to be in accord with our goals of close interaction. I was not completely thrilled with it because it seemed that we needed a better theory about inheritance entirely (and still do). … But no comprehensive and clean multiple inheritance scheme appeared that was compelling enough to surmount Dan's original Simula-like design. page 84
igouy|7 months ago
"Unfortunately, inheritance — though an incredibly powerful technique — has turned out to be very difficult for novices (and even professionals) to deal with." Alan Kay, The Early History of Smalltalk, page 82
That's taken from a section which reflects on introducing programming to children in the summer of '73 —
In part, what we were seeing was the "hacker phenomenon", that for any given pursuit, a particular 5% of the population will jump into it naturally, while the 80% or so who can learn it in time do not find it natural.
… it is likely that this area is more like writing than we wanted it to be. Namely, for the "80%", it really has to be learned gradually over a period of years in order to build up the structures that need to be there for design and solution look-ahead.
Here's how that Alan Kay quote is used in The Big OOPs —13:47 -- It's because 10 years earlier, he was already saying he kind of soured on it. He's like, inheritance was like really powerful, but people just didn't know how to use it. Novices and experts apparently both couldn't use it, right. It was just uh you know, it's really good, but no one can figure out how to use it, I guess. Uh so that's a little bit weird.
Not "kind-of-soured on it" one page later —There were a variety of strong desires for a real inheritance mechanism from Adele and me, from Larry Tesler, who was working on desktop publishing, and from the grad students. page 83
Not "kind-of-soured on it" but wanting a "comprehensive and clean multiple inheritance scheme" —A word about inheritance. … By the time Smalltalk-76 came along, Dan Ingalls had come up with a scheme that was Simula-like in it's semantics but could be incrementally changed on the fly to be in accord with our goals of close interaction. I was not completely thrilled with it because it seemed that we needed a better theory about inheritance entirely (and still do). … But no comprehensive and clean multiple inheritance scheme appeared that was compelling enough to surmount Dan's original Simula-like design. page 84
igouy|7 months ago