XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

Alan Kay – american scientist in the field of theory of computer systems. One of the pioneers in the fields of object-oriented programming and graphical interface. He developed the Smalltalk programming language, where the object-oriented approach was first applied. Winner of the 2003 Turing prize for work on object-oriented programming, Kyoto Prize (2004).

One of the creators of the one Laptop Per Child project. Alan Kay was born in the early forties. His mother was a professional singer, so the education was dominated by the humanitarian principle and a significant place was given to music. In 1961, he was expelled from College, became a jazz musician and a guitar teacher for his participation in the protest against the introduction of a percentage quota for Jewish students. But another talent, which brought him much greater fame, showed up unexpectedly at kyoya when enrolling voluntarily in the army, he passed the test on the ability to programming, were highly appreciated and forwarded to the U.S. air force for work on the IBM 1401 computer.

After serving in the army, she studied at the University of Colorado, majoring in mathematics and molecular biology, and in 1966 she moved to the University of Utah, where she became acquainted with the works of Ivan Sutherland, one of the creators of virtual reality. If Bush built a hypothetical memex machine to Express his views, Kay created a Dynabook virtual machine. His concept he outlined in the article Personal Dynamic Media( IEEE Computer, 1977, V. 3, No. 10, p. 3. 31). What was new was that Dynabook was not seen as a computing device, but as a media tool for the layman user. Kay described it as a portable interactive device with a flat panel touch screen, wireless communication system and multimedia capabilities. Here it was assumed the principle of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editors and drawing techniques. It is said that Kay was a very enthusiastic person: he was so carried away by Dynabook that he equated it with the invention of Gutenberg. For this machine of the future was designed and modeled graphical interface Star GUI, which included all the familiar elements today-Windows, icons, menus and more. The Star GUI became the prototype of the Macintosh interface. The Dynabook project has never been completed, but its validity has been proven by the impact it has had on the future. However, there was one attempt to implement "in iron" — under the name Alto-based minicomputer Nova, and then Dorado. The closest practical successors Dynabook steel Knowledge Navigator (Apple, 1987) and Newton, developed by a former employee of Apple John Scully (John Sculley). The most significant practical result of Alan Kay's work in Xerox PARC was the creation of the Smalltalk language (the name can be translated as "casual conversation"). The need for its development arose due to the fact that the programming languages that existed at that time were mainly focused on solving computational problems.

They had the necessary tools to work with symbols, but they were too professional and did not fit the Dynabook project. Therefore, a high priority was given to the development of a new language. Some of his ideas were borrowed from Papert, which built the Logo programming language, based on the work of the French psychologist Jean piaget.

Initially, it was assumed that Smalltalk as a Dynabook programming tool would be very simple, accessible to children. Its first version was modeled by several thousand Basic operators in October 1972, an Assembly language version (Smalltalk-72) appeared four months later, and later, in 1974, when it was installed on Alto, experimental work with children could be started. Until 1980, work on Smalltalk-72, and then Smalltalk-74 were exclusively local. It was decided to make the Smalltalk-80 version public, for which it was supposed to release several types of documents, from articles to books (sequentially "Blue", "Orange" and "Green"). In this work, a significant role was played by Dan Ingalls (Dan Ingalls).

To language you can use on different platforms, implemented in a virtual machine (Virtual Machine, VM) and virtual image (Virtual Image VI). VI is a collection of classes that encode Smalltalk functionality, including the definition of data structures, text and graphics methods, compilers, decompilers, and debuggers. The compiler generated code in an intermediate language called byte codes. VM provided the interpretation of the byte codes on any platform. The modern reader of the name of the bytecode and the virtual machine cause quite certain associations with Java. The future of Smalltalk and its connection to Java is extremely interesting, but these questions are not included in the topic of this article.

With the departure of Xerox PARC ends the romantic period of Alan Kay's life. From 1984 to 1996, he had the status of a free researcher (Fellow) at Apple, then moved to the position of Vice President of research and development at Walt Disney. Now he leads a division of Walt Disney Imagineering Lab. where the newest attractions for Disney world parks are developed. Incidentally, with age Alan Kay has changed not only superficially, now classical music attracts his more, than jazz was.

Bibliographic list:

Алан Кёртис Кей [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://www.biografguru.ru/about/key/?q=3289 свободный.