Simula

In the early 1970s, how radical was the idea of an object-oriented language? Um, w- what, what was that world like? I mean, I, what I remember is I remember Pascal, I remember Basic, I r- I r- I remember C, but, you know, where, where does Smalltalk fit in?

So, um, Alan usually tells the story of the first time he saw Simula 68, um, which was really an o- an attended simulation environment with objects, but not purely all objects, not pur- purely message sending.

Um, whenever he would, um, get the group together and want us to remember, remember, remember the past, it was Ivan Sutherland and Sketchpad, and that was not just an object-based system, but one where their visualization was there and you could touch and change things.

So there was, uh, there was a lot of build on the shoulders of s- of s- of those ideas.

So we have a challenge, and that challenge is when you give something to a child, they may understand it as something appropriate for their age, and then s- there's something they get from that, but it gets pushed away.

You know, Puff the Magic Dragon sort of s- comes to mind.

Um, and, and our challenge was a l- much harder, which is if you teach somebody an initial programming experience, what you're hoping is that you can filter what they see so that they're not shocked or scared by it, and the Simulation Kit was my first opportunity to demonstrate that.

Like, e- even when you went to debug, you did not see anything but what was an object in the Simulation Kit.