Alex sat down with Alan Wirfs-Brock, a pioneer of personal computing best known for his work on Smalltalk and on Javascript standardization. We discussed about the historical context and the reasons for OOP to appear, the initial OOP vision, the Smalltalk implementation, Javascript standardization, and finally about ambient computing.
This conversation is part of the Agile Challenges series.
Allen Wirfs-Brok is an expert in programming languages and their implementation with broad experience developing compilers, virtual machines, programming environments, and complete computer systems. He was a technical innovator and business leader during the emergence of object-oriented programming technology and was deeply involved with the development of the Smalltalk programming language. He’s been a strategic technologist, researcher, software architect, startup advisor, assembly language programmer, product developer, and manager.