The tattered history of OOP

Over at ZDNet, there is an article titled “The tattered history of OOP”, which seems to say that Smalltalk’s creator Alan Kay was originally after scalable systems and wanted something which reminds surprisingly of Erlang:

Object primitives were used to parse messages sent to objects, and then the messages were matched with methods via. pattern matching. This happened at run time using late binding.
[..]
Kay saw objects as “virtual computers�?, and made an analogy between objects and Unix processes [..].
[..]
In Kay’s scheme of things classes and methods could be updated at any time, even while the corresponding objects were doing something.
[..]
What Kay considered most important about OOP was not the objects, but the message passing that goes on between them. “The abstraction is in the messages, not the objects.�? He’s apologized for years for coming up with the term “object-oriented programming�?, because it got everyone focused on the objects, not the messages.

And I thought it was just about doing nice GUIs.

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