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Alan Kay

American computer scientist who pioneered object-oriented programming and GUI design.

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Alan Kay

via Wikipedia: Alan Kay · see source

Kay also designed early versions of the Smalltalk programming language and coined the term "object-oriented".[1]

Life and work

His doctoral dissertation described the invention of a computer language named FLEX.[2] A 1968 meeting with Seymour Papert introduced Kay to the Logo programming language, which subsequently directed his attention to the research of Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, and Lev Vygotsky.[3] Kay served as Chief Scientist at Atari from 1981 through 1984, and subsequently became an Apple Fellow in 1984.[4] Following the 1997 closure of the Apple Advanced Technology Group, Kay accepted a position as a Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering.[4]

What the cited sources add

The I Programmer article notes that Kay left Xerox PARC after Adele Goldberg and others formed Parc Place Systems to promote Smalltalk.[5] It states that Steve Jobs spent time persuading Kay to join Apple in 1984.[5] Kay remained at Apple as a research fellow until the Advanced Technology Group closed in 1997.[5]

References

  1. Wikipedia, "Alan Kay" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kay, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", 1997; "Alan Kay Biography, Inventions, & Facts Britannica", www.britannica.com (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
  2. Wikipedia, "Alan Kay" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kay, "FLEX: A Flexible Extendable Language", University of Utah, 1968; Alesso, "Connections: Patterns of Discovery", John Wiley & Sons, 2008, p. 61; Barnes, "Alan Kay: Transforming the Computer Into a Communication Medium", Engineering & Technology History Wiki (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  3. Wikipedia, "Alan Kay" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Kennedy, "Inventology: How we dream up things that change the world", Mariner Books, 2016, p. 115 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  4. Wikipedia, "Alan Kay" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Alan Kay", I Programmer, November 13, 2009 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
  5. "Alan Kay", I Programmer, November 13, 2009. facts only, no text reused. i-programmer.info

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Alan Kay (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.

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Sources

Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.

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