The Big Idea

I recently came across an original quote from Alan Kay where he discusses the “big idea” behind Smalltalk:

Smalltalk is not only NOT its syntax or the class library,
it is not even about classes. I'm sorry that I long ago
coined the term "objects" for this topic because it gets
many people to focus on the lesser idea.     

The big idea is "messaging" -- that is what the kernal of
Smalltalk/Squeak is all about (and it's something that was
never quite completed in our Xerox PARC phase). The Japanese
have a small word -- ma -- for "that which is in between"
-- perhaps the nearest English equivalent is "interstitial".     

The key in making great and growable systems is much more to
design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal
properties and behaviors should be.     

Think of the internet -- to live, it
(a) has to allow many different kinds of ideas and realizations
that are beyond any single standard and
(b) to allow varying degrees of safe interoperability between
these ideas.

The full message from Alan Kay is here.

The guiding philosophy of Vista Smalltalk is to be a flexible tool for building applications from both local and remote components – the language syntax is only a part of the story.