From: zuzu <sean.zuzu@...>
Date: 2004-07-19T15:56:49+09:00
Subject: ruby as FP and OO, history of smalltalk and scheme

someone said earlier (sorry that i'm too lazy to properly attribute,
feel free to reply if this was you) that "ruby is functional in the
small and object-oriented in the large".  although not directly
related to ruby, i found this quite interesting given the following:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CarlHewitt

Carl Hewitt
Developed the ActorsModel, and several ActorsLanguages, at MIT in the 1970s/80s.

Developed the famous Planner ArtificialIntelligence language (never
fully implemented; Hewitt said of the slightly-later PrologLanguage
that it was exactly what he had in mind for Planner, but done right).

The SchemeLanguage dialect of the LispFamily was created as a toy Lisp
interpreter by GuySteele and GeraldSussman in 1975 to experiment with
Carl Hewitt's theory of actors, an object-oriented computational
paradigm. http://www.informatik.uni-bremen.de/~net/history.html

AlanKay was a student of Hewitt's, and the two influenced each other's
ideas, so that it is fair to say that AlanKay had a strong influence
on Hewitt's ActorsLanguage (and thereby on Scheme), while Hewitt had a
strong influence on the early design of the SmalltalkLanguage.
http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/EarlyHistoryST.html

Scheme and Smalltalk are thereby historical siblings, and although
it's not instantly obvious to the unpracticed eye, have some traits in
common. Smalltalk was further influenced by Scheme circa 1980 and
turned its blocks into true closures.

Home page: http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/hewitt/hewitt.html