22 Jul 2005
HP Fires Father of OOP

Who needs a research department, anyway? They don't contribute to next quarter's bottom line, except as an expense!

It really pains me to see what's become of what was once the crown jewel of American technical prowess: HP has been reduced to a shill for foreign hardware products and will now lack even the baseline for any software innovation.

I don't know where William Hewlett and David Packard are buried, but beware of small earthquakes in the area as they roll in their graves over the shambles that has been made of their baby.

Hewlett-Packard has disbanded its Advanced Software Research team and sent its leader, renowned programmer Alan Kay, packing. From today's Good Morning Silicon Valley: 'HP is bidding adieu to legendary Silicon Valley technologist Alan Kay. A founder of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, Kay -- who once said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" -- was instrumental in the development of the windowing GUI and modern object-oriented programming. He envisioned a laptop computer long before the first ones rolled out and his Smalltalk programming language was a predecessor to Sun Microsystems' Java. Hard to believe HP's cutting him loose.'

(link) [Slashdot]

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