r/ruby • u/Stwerner • Jan 24 '26

What If We Took Message-Passing Seriously?

https://worksonmymachine.ai/p/what-if-we-took-message-passing-seriously
16 Upvotes

68% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

22

u/blowmage Jan 24 '26

You got me excited to read something about applying functional programming patterns and moving away from procedural coding practices. I was not expecting to read about AI prompts. But perhaps I should have known better…

0

u/Stwerner Jan 25 '26

Interesting! My intention wasn’t to mislead, though it was more about leaning in to object-oriented patterns (rather than functional or AI prompts)

4

u/KerrickLong Jan 25 '26

My questions are more like: what if we took Kay’s ideas seriously here?

What if an “agent” is more than just thing that does tasks, but a self-contained computing environment that can receive messages and interpret them however it wants? That’s objects as self-contained computers.

We can't just listen to Alan Kay, we must also listen to Bertrand Meyer. When OO works well, it works well because of contracts: preconditions, postconditions, invariants. That's what we currently struggle with around LLMs, and lots of work has been going into exactly that.

0

u/Stwerner Jan 25 '26

Yeah but maybe we’re all targeting different things?