Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet

Why HN readers recommended it

Treated as a foundational talk, cited constantly for Kay's views on object-oriented programming and for rethinking software practice.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Jeff Gonis

Topic

object-oriented programming philosophy

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

6

HN mentions in dataset

20

Recommendation years in dataset

2013–2025

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• You should check out Alan Kay's OOPSLA keynote "The Compute Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" at [VIDEO] specifically about 20 mintues in where he says that a browser should be exactly what you say here. On the one hand, he was talking about this almost 20 …

• Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: [VIDEO] If you want to see what "practical" OOP looked like in the 80s, …

• I recently (re)discovered Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA talk: [VIDEO] For others that have been following his work (and talks), it doesn't really contain much new stuff, but the context of a talk to an audience of programmers brings out some different contexts. He touches on …