“What Alan Kay Got Wrong About Objects”
Kay was at least as inspired by <i>biological</i> processes -- bacteria transmitting chemical signals to one another, for instance -- as he was by computer networks.<p>I think the big thing that Kay missed was asynchronicity. What Kay was thinking of when he coined the term "object oriented" -- rather than C++ -- was a sort of synchronous actor model in which the actor would always wait for a response after sending a message. This maps nicely onto function calls, but considerably more power can be had by letting the actor optionally continue doing stuff while awaiting a response. Bacteria continue to metabolize after sending chemical signals to their brethren after all!<p>As I've seen it said, Erlang is Smalltalk done right.