To me, one of the nice things about the semantics of real objects is that they are “real computers all the way down (RCATWD)” – this always retains the full ability to represent anything. The old way quickly gets to two things that aren’t computers – data and procedures – and all of a sudden the ability to defer optimizations and particular decisions in favour of behaviours has been lost. In other words, always having real objects always retains the ability to simulate anything you want, and to send it around the planet. … And RCATWD also provides perfect protection in both directions. We can see this in the hardware model of the Internet (possibly the only real object-oriented system in working order). You get language extensibility almost for free by simply agreeing on conventions for the message forms. My thought in the 70s was that the Internet we were all working on alongside personal computing was a really good scalable design, and that we should make a virtual internet of virtual machines that could be cached by the hardware machines. It’s really too bad that this didn’t happen.