As a Norwegian I must say it kind of pisses me off how Alan Kay gets all the praise for object-oriented programming when it was invented by Kristen Nygaard and other Norwegians at the University of Oslo back in the 1960s in the language Simula, long before Alan Kay. In fact Kay was inspired by Simula. Bjarne as a fellow Scandinavian knew Simula well, but could not use it at Bell Labs, because it was all about C there. So he decided to extend C to be more like Simula.

Hence this Alan Kay quote gets the historical development all wrong. C++ was derived from Simula and C not from Smalltalk.

And in fact C++ is closer to the Simula idea of object-oriented programming than Smalltalk.

Mind you I don’t like C++ at all, and have a certain affinity for Smalltalk but that is another issue.