主题：2003年度图灵奖揭晓 得主SmallTalk语言发明人Alan Kay -- 老叶

计算机学会（ACM）于4月19日宣布，2003年度有“计算机界诺贝尔奖”之称的ACM 图灵奖授予第一个完全面向对象的动态计算机程序设计语言Smalltalk的发明者Alan Kay。

Smalltalk源自Alan Kay “使用一组独立的互相通信的对象来解决问题”的思想，它可以说是目前主流语言C++，Java和C#的前身。也正是Alan Kay 发明了“Object Oriented”这个术语。1972年，他来到施乐PARC，开始将Smalltalk作为一种儿童教育工具。在PARC期间他还与同事构建了最早的图形界面个人电脑Alto，成为Machitosh和Windows的先驱。

直到今天，Smalltalk仍然具有很强的生命力，在工业界和学术界都有应用。而且，众所周知，模式、敏捷运动最早都是从Smalltalk圈子里出来的。

在Alan Kay的眼中看来，易用性永远是计算机科学家和开发者必须牢记的原则。我们比较一下在C++系列语言中的代码：

for (int x = 0; x < 10; x++)

{

System.out.print ("Hello");

}

而在Squeak，Smalltalk的一种实现（非常重视儿童教育）中，代码会写成这样：

10 timesRepeat: [Transcript show: ’Hello ’.].

而Alan Kay还有一句名言广为流传：“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

值得一提的是，Alan Kay在投身计算机行业之前，曾经是职业音乐家，因此他的讲演以多姿多彩著称。

[深入阅读]：Alan Kay 的生平

Alan Kay, Springfield, MA; Alan Kay is one of the inventors of the Smalltalk programming language and one of the fathers of the idea of Object Oriented Programming. He is the conceiver of the laptop computer and the architect of the modern windowing GUI.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

--Alan Kay

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Education

B.S., Mathematics and Molecular Biology, University of Colorado, 1966;

M.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Utah;

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Utah, 1969;

Professional Experience

Professor, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, 1970;

Group Leader, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1972

Programmer, Atari, 1983

Apple Fellow, Apple Computer, 1984

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Although Kay was born in Springfield, Massachusetts his family moved to Australia where he lived for the first few years of his life. However, the threat of Japanese invasion during World War II prompted his parents to return to the United States. The gifted youth learned to read by the age of three and was continually pushing his mind and expanding his knowledge as he grew older.(1)

"By the time I got to school, I had already read a couple hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I had already been exposed to other points of view. School is basically about one point of view -- the one the teacher has or the textbooks have. They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle. Of course I would pipe up with my five-year-old voice." (1)

Kay was also exposed to music since early childhood; his mother was both a musician and an artist. He was a soprano soloist in his grade school choir and a proficient guitar player at an early age. Indeed he considered the idea of becoming a professional musician.

When, in 1961, he was expelled from Bethany College in West Virginia for protesting the Jewish quota he relied on his musical talents and made a living in Denver giving guitar lessons. But he found another latent talent when he joined the volunteer service and performed well on a computed programming aptitude test. He was sent to work on an IBM 1401 by the U.S. Air Force.(1)

When he left the Air Force, Kay matriculated at the University of Colorado where he studied Mathematics and Molecular Biology. When he graduated in 1966 he enrolled at the University of Utah in Electrical Engineering.(1)

While studying at the University of Utah he learned to use the innovative SketchPad program developed by Ivan Sutherland and began programming in Simula. Borrowing ideas from these and other programs, as well as from his background in Biology, he formulated his "biological analogy." Kay postulated that the ideal computer would function like a living organism; each "cell" would behave in accord with others to accomplish an end goal but would also be able to function autonomously. "Cells" could also regroup themselves in order to attack another problem or handle another function.(3)

In the autumn of 1968, Kay first met Seymour Papert at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and became interested in the LOGO language. Kay’s entire concept of the role of the computer in society was shaken when he watched Papert and his colleagues teaching children how to program in LOGO.

In 1968 I saw two or three things that sort of changed my whole notion of computing. The way we had been thinking about it was sort of Doug Englebart’s view that the mainframe was like a railroad, owned by an institution that decided what you could do and when you could do it. Englebart was trying to be like Henry Ford. A personal computer as it was thought of in the sixties was like an automobile. In 1968 I saw Seymour Papert’s first work with kids and LOGO, and I saw the first really great handwriting-character-recognition system at Rand. It’s a fabulous system. And that had a huge influence on me because it had an intimate feel. When I combined that with the idea that kids had to use it, the concept of a computer because something much more like a supermedium. Something more like a superpaper."(2)

After writing a thesis about graphical object-orientation and being awarded a Ph.D. at the University of Utah he spent two years teaching at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. While there he began thinking about a book-sized computer that the user, especially children, could use in place of paper. He dubbed his project "KiddieKomp." It was at this time that he also began work on the Smalltalk language.

Smalltalk was designed to mimic Kay’s biological model of individual entities, or "cells," communicating with each other via messages. Eventually his Smalltalk language would father the genre of Objected Oriented Programming languages.

In 1972 Kay took a job at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC) and began using Smalltalk in an educational context. Young children were exposed to computers and their reactions were analyzed. Kay concluded that children learned more through images and sounds than through plain text and, along with other researchers at PARC, Kay developed a simple computer system which made heavy use of graphics and animation. Some of the children became very adept at using this system; in fact, some developed complicated programs of their own with it! (3)

While leading a research group at PARC, Kay also made a model of a laptop computer and contributed to the development of Ethernet, laser printing, and the "client-server" network model. Sadly, the technology to make his prototype laptop called "Dynabook" did not yet exist. Kay, however, pushed Xerox for funds to develop some of his ideas but the Xerox management, not blessed with Kay’s foresight, was not willing to commit major resources to development. When Steve Jobs, Jeff Raskin, and some other Apple pioneers visited PARC in 1979, however, they recognized immediately that Kay’s ideas were the way of the future. They were impressed with the idea of a windowing GUI and were astounded with the flexibility of the Smalltalk language. Kay’s work at PARC were the seeds from which the Apple Macintosh’s look grew. Even Microsoft Windows, the most popular computer operating system in the world today, is a scion of Kay’s ideas.

Kay left Xerox in 1983 and, after a brief stint at Atari, became an Apple Fellow in 1984 -- the year the Macintosh, the first mass-marketed GUI-centric computer, was produced. During the next few years Kay lived in Los Angeles but trekked across the country to teach brief stints at MIT and to work at Apple. Most of his time, however, was spent teaching children to use computers at his Open School in West Hollywood, California.(3)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So what is Kay working on now? In a 1991 interview with Byte he described "Agent based systems." and said he was in the process of writing a new computer language that constructed simulated intelligence within the computer so as to allow the machine to tell itself what to do. An "agent," according to Kay, was a kernel of intelligence in the computer. In this article Kay predicted agent-based commercial systems by the year 2000. He envisions a computer that can learn from the user and adapt to the user’s needs. He also wants to finally mass-produce his "Dynabook."(2)

In my opinion, Kay’s most noteworthy contribution to the world of computer science was that of a shifted paradigm; He changed the way both the industry and the world thinks of computers. Before Kay’s work a computer was a non-personal box that spat text at you. If you wanted to interact with this machine you had to learn to speak its language. Kay, because of his experience with children, his love of education, his diverse interests, and his genius, recognized that users can and should interact with a computer in different ways and should not be limited to only text. He was among the first to represent objects in a computer as pictures -- a metaphor that he further extended by developing the concept of object orientation. He is, clearly, one of the fathers of the modern PC.

Concerned with the blindness of society to the latent potential that computer offer, Kay worries that the machine he so loves will become some "mass opiate." While the computer could possibly have a negative affect on society and become another television, Kay hopes that it will have a far more beneficial role in the future of humankind.(3)

Kay is enraptured by the potential impact that computing technology can have on the world. He is especially interested in education and hopes that this new technology will create, what he calls, a "skeptical man." He likens the personal computer to the present day book and believes that if everyone had access to a computer, people would be more prone to play "what-if" games with information. He says that "the [information] retrieval systems of the future are not going to retrieve facts but points of view. The weakness of databases is that they let you retrieve facts, while the strength of our culture over the past several hundred years has been our ability to take on multiple points of view. It should be possible for every kid everywhere to test what he or she is being told either against arguments of others or by appeal to computer simulation. The question is: will society nurture that potential or suppress it?"(2)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Works Cited

Lazere, Cathy, and Dennis Sasha. Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists. Dub-Copernicus. New York, NY 1995.

Ryan, Bob. "Dynabook Revisited with Alan Kay." Byte. vol 16, February 1991.

Janssens, Michelle. "CS400 BIO: Alan C. Kay" http://www.kzoo.edu/~abrady/CS400/bioW96/michelle.html, September 25, 1996.

See Also:

Kay, Alan. "The Early History of SmallTalk", in Bergin, Jr., T.J., and R.G. Gibson. History of Programming Languages - II, ACM Press, New York NY, and Addison-Wesley Publ. Co., Reading MA 1996, pp. 511-578, with additional commentary and transcripts.

Apple Computer Inc. "Feature" http://www.research.apple.com/people/features/kay.html, September 25, 1996.

Biography published in connection with "A Celebration of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 Vision, An Examination of What Has Been Accomplished, and What Remains to Be Done", MIT, 1995 (accessed Wednesday, December 18, 1996).