β Scribed by Coplien, James O.
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Computers were invented largely as mental aids. In inventing object-orientation, Alan Kay renewed that vision on a metaphorical level that no longer subordinated computers to human minds. Trygve Reenskaug tried to link the worlds of the human and the computer together with Model-View-Controller, but at the time he got only half the job done. Today we're stuck in this Kantian object world where individual objects act alone and programmers live inside of classes looking out: there is rarely any sense of collective behaviour in object-oriented systems, and there is rarely any degree of behavioural (self-)organization.
I have been working with Trygve on a paradigm called DCI (Data, Context and Interaction) that places the human experiences of design and use of programs equally at centre stage. It balances the object interaction view with the traditional data conceptualization of class-oriented programming. DCI offers a vision of computers and people being mutually alive in Christopher Alexander's sense of great design. It serves Kay's original vision of objectorientation powering computers as mental adjuncts, as well as his vision of objects as a recursion on the concept of a computer. In this world with a rapidly growing number of increasingly connected human minds, DCI opens up a playful dialogue contrasting metaphors of collective human reasoning and Kay's vision of object computation.
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