Joe Armstrong interviews Alan Kay

Code Mesh this year is a week away (Nov 11th) from Alan Kay's 50th anniversary of the "realization" about "objects", where objects do not share memory and communicate with each other through message passing. He calls it a realization rather than "invention" because "everything was kind of there" in the form of what Turing came to in the 30s, Sketchpad did in 1962, what Simula didn't quite do in 1965 (but still did something interesting), the "processes" in the form of what were called "virtual machines" for time-sharing and multiprocessing, and the recently started serious discussions in the ARPA community about how to do Licklider's "InterGalactic Network".

This session will start with a 15 minute introduction by Alan Kay, discussing where we are now, how we got here, and the progress (or lack there of) which we have made in the last 50 years. It will be followed by an interview session lead by Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of the language that got "objects" right.