It was originablly conceived as a simulation of a distributed system.
Distributed systems can be useful but does anyone really believe that they are simpler or easier to develop and maintain?
The amazing part to me is that so many were trained and convinced to accept that adopting this simulation could make all programming easier or somehow "better". As if adding complexity would magically lead to simplification.
Graphical programming like LabVIEW looks very appealing. The product demo practically sells itself. Sure, it fits well for a very narrow class of use cases. But even fairly simple things in a textual language quickly become an unwieldy mess. (Try factoring an integer in it…)
There are formal models for distributed systems often solve the “easy” problems that didn’t need solving while making various practical concerns harder/impossible such as timeouts or node failure.
I believe that programs written in languages made for distributed systems are simpler and easier to maintain.
Also I believe that one of the major problems in modern computing is that most languages we use do not understand that even trivial programs require ‘communication’ and OS/hardware facilities that have behaviours of distributed systems such as latency, transient faults, etc.
ahartmetz•1d ago
mycall•1d ago
How does Simula differ here?
ahartmetz•1d ago
Alan Kay's distaste for (static) types is just his opinion and an original contribution of IMO rather dubious value.
After the dust has settled, it seems like the most valuable parts of OOP are private data, convenience (no need to repeat the class name in a method call), good fit for some domains, and interfaces.
jqpabc123•1d ago
Which can be easily achieved without OOP.
pitched•8m ago