Kay Interview

Via James Robertson, an interview with Alan Kay at ACM Queue:

  One of the things that people realized from these extensible languages is that   there is the unfortunate difficulty of making the meta-system easy to use. Smalltalk-72   was actually used by children. You’re always extending the language without   realizing it when you are making ordinary classes. The result of this was that   you didn’t have to go into a more esoteric place like a compiler compiler—Yacc   or something like that—to add some extension to the language.

As ever from Kay, some lovely ideas. Well worth a read.

I didn't realise quite how much Smalltalk had changed through the 70s. Sounds as if I could do to get my head round Smalltalk-72 at some stage.