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A comment on Notes by Andy Hertzfeld on Alan Kay's talk at Creative Think seminar, July 1982. Parent comment

Re:Notes by Andy Hertzfeld on Alan Kay's talk at Creative Th... by cxr on Tuesday July 28, 2020 @07:30PM (#23981814)
Alan Kay is a proponent for the notion of pervasive use of objects that work by sending and receiving messages, which leads to things like Smalltalk famously having no "if" statements. The attitude is pretty similar to the one that Lisp folks have. It's possible that Hertzfeld had a different takeaway than what Kay meant, but it's not clear.
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Re:Notes by Andy Hertzfeld on Alan Kay's talk at Creative Th... by hboon on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @03:12AM (#23984159)
In case it wasn't clear, Smalltalk does have if statements. They just aren't special keywords like in most other languages; instead, they are methods of the True/False classes.

The way it is implemented (hopefully) opens up the mind to how OO actually can work, but in practise, when you use if-else in Smalltalk, it's pretty much the same as in other languages.

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