3 ms·

Having watched nearly every talk/interview of Kay I could find on YouTube (which includes the OOPSLA keynote) and having read some of his writings I think I hav

Having watched nearly every talk/interview of Kay I could find on YouTube (which includes the OOPSLA keynote) and having read some of his writings I think I have a reasonably good understanding of what he is advocating for. Here is Kay talking about Internet's resilience in a bit more detail: https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1472 https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1472 >His position is strongly aligned with the "mechanism, not policy" philosophy. I don't see how this opposes or contradicts any of what I wrote above.

jasode 9y ago
>and having read some of his writings I think I have a reasonably good understanding of what he is advocating for. In the Dr Dobbs interview[1] that you pulled the quote from, Alan Kay is not talking about protocols for web resilience. Actually, there is no mention of "protocols" in that article at all. Even outside of that particular article, AK doesn't talk much about "protocols" other than the protocol of "message passing" in Smalltalk which is a different meaning from "internet protocols". Tim Berners-Lee is a figure that speaks of new protocols for decentralization, etc. That's not Alan Kay's angle. If you think AK is imploring the tech community for new internet protocols, you need to cite another AK source other than that Dr Dobbs interview. >[Alan Kay] was talking about the lack of protocol-level solutions for resilience of the Web. That's not what he's talking about. He's complaining that the "web" did not make it easy for people to do computing. One example in that interview was Wikipedia page on Logo programming language not being able to execute Logo programs. Kay's criticism of the "web done by amateurs" looks to be the same train of thought about his ideal Dynabook enabling people to participate in computing rather than something like the Apple iPad where people just read news or watch videos. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=240003442&siteSectionName=architecture-and-design http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=240003442&sit...
- romaniv 9y ago
  Just because Kay criticized the Web for its limits on user participation does not mean he did not criticize it for other reasons. Here is an entire talk on complexity and robustness in software where the Web is mentioned as one of the worst offenders of design by accretion: https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM?t=1046 https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM?t=1046 (I'm linking to a specific part, but the entire thing is worth listening to.) Also, he does talk about protocols. Heck, VPRI implemented a TCP/IP implementation by treating it as a language and using a non-deterministic parser. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf Page 17.

jasode 9y ago

>and having read some of his writings I think I have a reasonably good understanding of what he is advocating for. In the Dr Dobbs interview[1] that you pulled the quote from, Alan Kay is not talking about protocols for web resilience. Actually, there is no mention of "protocols" in that article at all. Even outside of that particular article, AK doesn't talk much about "protocols" other than the protocol of "message passing" in Smalltalk which is a different meaning from "internet protocols". Tim Berners-Lee is a figure that speaks of new protocols for decentralization, etc. That's not Alan Kay's angle. If you think AK is imploring the tech community for new internet protocols, you need to cite another AK source other than that Dr Dobbs interview. >[Alan Kay] was talking about the lack of protocol-level solutions for resilience of the Web. That's not what he's talking about. He's complaining that the "web" did not make it easy for people to do computing. One example in that interview was Wikipedia page on Logo programming language not being able to execute Logo programs. Kay's criticism of the "web done by amateurs" looks to be the same train of thought about his ideal Dynabook enabling people to participate in computing rather than something like the Apple iPad where people just read news or watch videos. [1] http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=240003442&siteSectionName=architecture-and-design http://www.drdobbs.com/article/print?articleId=240003442&sit...

romaniv 9y ago
Just because Kay criticized the Web for its limits on user participation does not mean he did not criticize it for other reasons. Here is an entire talk on complexity and robustness in software where the Web is mentioned as one of the worst offenders of design by accretion: https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM?t=1046 https://youtu.be/QboI_1WJUlM?t=1046 (I'm linking to a specific part, but the entire thing is worth listening to.) Also, he does talk about protocols. Heck, VPRI implemented a TCP/IP implementation by treating it as a language and using a non-deterministic parser. http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf Page 17.