Object-Oriented Programming: Regaining the Excitement

This paper is based on a speech delivered at the ECOOP'98 Conference Banquet. It is not a literal transcription of my talk, since no recording was made, but has been reconstructed ex post facto based upon my speaker's notes and my memory. I have also taken the opportunity to add some headings and references. Distinguished Chairmen, Members of the Conference Committee, Representatives of the sponsoring organizations, distinguished Professors, conference participants, and friends: Good evening. It's customary to start this kind of talk with a joke, at least in part to give the audience a chance to become accustomed to my strange accent before I start to say anything interesting, but I'm going to skip that tonight because I think that we have already heard quite enough jokes for one evening. To set the record straight from the very rst, I should make it clear that I do not work for IBM, nor have I worked for IBM in the past. Although I did once spend a very enjoyable year at IBM's Yorktown Heights Research Laboratory, IBM was very clear that I didn't work for them, even though I did turn up every day and they did pay me: I believe that the distinction had something to do with social security tax or health insurance. I should also point out, particularly for the bene t of those of you around the corner who cannot see me, that yes, I am wearing a tie, but no, I don't use a mainframe. I used to use a mainframe, but one day the mainframe broke and all of the little beads came o . [At this point the reader will have to imagine a large broken abacus frame with bent wires and missing beads.] 1 Inventing the Future of Object Technology The right thing to do in a talk of this nature is to predict the future of object technology, but prediction is hard, and predicting the future is especially hard! Alan Kay once said: \The best way to predict the future is to invent it". And he was remarkably accurate. Let me read you a quote from over 20 years ago. In the 1990's there will be millions of personal computers. They will be the size of notebooks of today, have high resolution at screen reective displays, weigh less than 10 pounds, have 10 to 20 times the computing and storage capacity of an Alto. Let's call them Dynabooks. The purchase price will be about that of a color television set of the era... Though the Dynabook will have considerable local storage and do most computing locally, it will spend a large percentage of its time hooked to various large, global information utilities which will permit communication with others of ideas, data, working models as well as the daily chit-chat that organizations need in order to function. This is from Alan's paper \The Early History of Smalltalk"[5], in which Alan quotes an internal Xerox PARC memo from around 1976. I recommend that paper most highly: if you nd any wisdom in my remarks this evening, please attribute it to Alan Kay and not to me. My goal tonight is to challenge you to put the excitement back into objectorientation, and to recapture some of the dynamism of those early Smalltalk days. Is this possible? Or has object-orientation become like structured programming: the right idea, but no longer the focus of innovation, exactly because everyone is already doing it. For example, we don't have a European Conference on Structured Programming every year. I don't think that object-orientation is yet at that point. There are still many hard problems to solve: scale and encapsulation are two that I will mention brie y tonight. 2 Programming Language Contributions Relevant to