I’m blogging about the development of a new product in Mozilla, look here for my other posts in this series

I’ve been reading the Early History Of Smalltalk, notes by Alan Kay, and this small note jumped out at me:

Another late-binding scheme that is already necessary is to get away from direct protocol matching when a new object shows up in a system of objects. In other words, if someone sends you an object from halfway around the world it will be unusual if it conforms to your local protocols. At some point it will be easier to have it carry even more information about itself–enough so its specifications can be “understood” and its configuration into your mix done by the more subtle matching of inference.

[…]

This higher computational finesse will be needed as the next paradigm shift–that of pervasive networking–takes place over the next five years. Objects will gradually become active agents and will travel the networks in search of useful information and tools for their managers. Objects brought back into a computational environment from halfway around the world will not be able to configure themselves by direct protocol matching as do objects today. Instead, the objects will carry much more information about themselves in a form that permits inferential docking. Some of the ongoing work in specification can be turned to this task.

An object, sent over the network; it does not exactly have a common protocol, class, or API, but enough information so it can be understood, matched up with some function or purpose according to inference. We could also assume given this is from Alan Kay that the vision here is that code, not just data, is part of the object and information (though to consider code to be information: that is quite a challenge to our modern sensibilities).

When I read this, it struck me that we have these objects all around us. The web page: remote, transferable, transformable, embodying functionality and data, with rich information suitable for inference.

The web page has a kind of minimal protocol, though nothing is entirely forbidden in how it is interpreted. For instance the page is named in its

http://www.ianbicking.org/blog/2015/07/product-journal-objects.html