Dan Ingalls
Principal Investigator
Dan Ingalls (PI) conceived the Lively Web live object system (http://lively-web.org/ ) which remains the vehicle for his research at HARC. He spent much of his youth studying and experimenting in physics, but in his last year of college discovered computers and programming. He was fortunate to join Alan Kay at Xerox PARC, and spent time at Xerox and Apple working out various schemes for message syntax, language interpretation and graphical display as they invented much of OOP. He was the architect and principal implementer of a series of Smalltalk implementations culminating in the self-supporting Squeak Smalltalk. The higher focus on education in those systems made simplicity a priority, and that priority continues in the current work on Lively.