Big takeaways from this is that unnecessary complexity is stalling software engineering as a discipline which is bounded by human fragility and the limited "complexity budget" that the human mind can withhold.<p>The Big Idea of Object Oriented Programming is "Messaging" and encapsulation, i.e. how objects encapsulate their internal complexity and expose their capabilities for maximum re-use and minimal knowledge and coupling of internals.<p>TCP/IP is Real Computers All The Way Down (RCATWD) and is possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order where its level of complication is balanced by its level of complexity, which retain the semantics of real objects in which the basic unit of computation is a whole computer. "The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."<p>RPC distorts developer mindsets by focusing on thinking of making a "remote call" instead of thinking of remote endpoints as (RCATWD) objects and focusing on instead of communication of messages and what optimal messaging API designs Services should expose for maximum encapsulation and re-use of their capabilities.
"And that they did, which saw through the creation of the impressive array of technologies invented at PARC which were the foundations for much of personal computing and programming as we know it today, including:
•Laser Printers
•Object Oriented Programming / Smalltalk
•Personal Computers
•Ethernet / Distributed Computing
•GUI / Mouse / WYSIWYG"<p>The work done at PARC was clearly influential, but mostly as a refinement of what came before. They were clearly building on the work of Engelbart and his team at Stanford. In fact, if I remember correctly, some members of that team ended up working at Xerox PARC.<p>In case this is new information to anyone, search on Google for 'The Mother Of All Demos'.