4 ms·

Kay found the web distasteful. “his conception of the World Wide Web was infinitely tinier and weaker and terrible. His thing was simple enough with other unso

by ttflee 8y ago

Kay found the web distasteful. “his conception of the World Wide Web was infinitely tinier and weaker and terrible. His thing was simple enough with other unsophisticated people to wind up becoming a de facto standard, which we’re still suffering from. You know, [HTML is] terrible and most people can’t see it.” https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...

gambler 8y ago
I assume you're posting this to show that Kay "doesn't get it"? The more I learn about cutting-edge technologies of the 60s, 70s and 80s, the more I'm convinced that he's entirely correct about the web and mobile. Most developers today are obsessed with tooling and features. Almost no one seems to care whether those tools and features have some kind of fundamentally valid idea behind them. Just look at the proliferation of HTTP security headers for a clear-cut example of how this works out in the long run.
- protomyth 8y ago
  Considering a whole Smalltalk VM is smaller than a lot of hero images on websites, I get the feeling that Kay is correct. I would imagine a containerized / sandboxed environment would have developed. I cannot see how it could be worse than today.
  - gambler 8y ago
    I recently started experimenting with Squeak. It's a bit dated, but holy crap, that thing is amazing. So many good ideas packed in so few megabytes. The startup time alone blows my mind. It's pretty much a virtual machine with a sort-of-operating-system that runs an IDE for all of its own source code, and it loads faster than 95% of all vanilla desktop apps I use today.
    - protomyth 8y ago
      I could see having the same setup as a browser except every url downloads a vm. I do wish Squeak would update its look and feel though.
      - scroot 8y ago
        They are still using bitmapped graphics under the hood, which explains some of the limitation. The community has shrunk, which means there's no one to take them to the world of vector. However, Pharo people are implementing a new vector engine called Bloc.
        protomyth 8y ago
        Pharo is pretty much the future. I wonder if WebAssembly and it’s upcoming ecosystem will be useful to take some load on a future Smalltalk? [edit: since I’m getting the posting too fast crap here is another language mentioned in the article KRL by Danny Bobrow and Terry Winograd https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/033e/cd544c4e71b14a7d3ee0611a300a20b91232.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/033e/cd544c4e71b14a7d3ee061... ]
        scroot 8y ago
        I think about that all the time. Imagine a Smalltalk VM written in WASM. It could load with every site and every site could just be live Smalltalk.
        sumim 8y ago
        Although it's not WASM, perhaps you will prefer http://squeak.js.org/ http://squeak.js.org/ , a Squeak VM written in JavaScript.
        3rdAccount 8y ago
        There's a guy that's written a nice looking Smalltalk in Ruby that works perfectly well in the browser with rails I think.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > I cannot see how it could be worse than today. I fear it would turn out equivalent. The starting stack might have been better, but the promise of money to be made and competitive pressures would be the same. We would "worse-is-better" ourselves to roughly the same spot we're in today. Bloat, tracking and clickbait. Whenever I implore people to cut down on software bloat, I know what I'm really asking is, "fight against the market, slow the decay down just a little bit".
    - woadwarrior01 8y ago
      > I fear it would turn out equivalent. Only some 30 or so years earlier, and who knows what we'd have come up with, given such an early head start? I work in the space of dynamic language runtimes, and it hurts me to see how ideas pioneered by SmallTalk and subsequently the Self language[1] runtimes haven't yet been adopted by some of the more popular dynamic languages today. [1]: http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/implementation.pdf http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/implementation....
      - pjmlp 8y ago
        The worse part is the insistence of Ruby and Python to keep JITs away from their canonical implementations. Sure there is PyPy and the "C JIT" on upcoming Ruby, but they don't seem to be widely deployed. Maybe with Graal and J9 focus on increasing support for dynamic languages, that will eventually change.
    - scroot 8y ago
      > I fear it would turn out equivalent. One argument against this is that the web today is not set up for easy authoring by end users (in fact, it's gotten more difficult to "make websites" as the web has progressed). But there was a hypermedia system around two decades ago that had authoring in mind from the start — hypercard — that could have been a good prototype for a "real web". If you have authoring as a primary consideration than perhaps one-directional, consumer oriented cultures of technology would not be so prominent. But who knows.
    - romaniv 8y ago
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  I've noticed this myself, and it makes me ashamed of modern computing honestly. It is as though the community has been taken over by some kind of religion that worships technology for its own sake. Technology is supposed to make our lives better, but there seems to be an increasing trend of sacrificing our own interests in service to increasing technological complexity, and these people embrace it.

by ttflee 8y ago

gambler 8y ago

I assume you're posting this to show that Kay "doesn't get it"? The more I learn about cutting-edge technologies of the 60s, 70s and 80s, the more I'm convinced that he's entirely correct about the web and mobile. Most developers today are obsessed with tooling and features. Almost no one seems to care whether those tools and features have some kind of fundamentally valid idea behind them. Just look at the proliferation of HTTP security headers for a clear-cut example of how this works out in the long run.

protomyth 8y ago
Considering a whole Smalltalk VM is smaller than a lot of hero images on websites, I get the feeling that Kay is correct. I would imagine a containerized / sandboxed environment would have developed. I cannot see how it could be worse than today.
- gambler 8y ago
  I recently started experimenting with Squeak. It's a bit dated, but holy crap, that thing is amazing. So many good ideas packed in so few megabytes. The startup time alone blows my mind. It's pretty much a virtual machine with a sort-of-operating-system that runs an IDE for all of its own source code, and it loads faster than 95% of all vanilla desktop apps I use today.
  - protomyth 8y ago
    I could see having the same setup as a browser except every url downloads a vm. I do wish Squeak would update its look and feel though.
    - scroot 8y ago
      They are still using bitmapped graphics under the hood, which explains some of the limitation. The community has shrunk, which means there's no one to take them to the world of vector. However, Pharo people are implementing a new vector engine called Bloc.
      - protomyth 8y ago
        Pharo is pretty much the future. I wonder if WebAssembly and it’s upcoming ecosystem will be useful to take some load on a future Smalltalk? [edit: since I’m getting the posting too fast crap here is another language mentioned in the article KRL by Danny Bobrow and Terry Winograd https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/033e/cd544c4e71b14a7d3ee0611a300a20b91232.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/033e/cd544c4e71b14a7d3ee061... ]
        scroot 8y ago
        I think about that all the time. Imagine a Smalltalk VM written in WASM. It could load with every site and every site could just be live Smalltalk.
        sumim 8y ago
        Although it's not WASM, perhaps you will prefer http://squeak.js.org/ http://squeak.js.org/ , a Squeak VM written in JavaScript.
        3rdAccount 8y ago
        There's a guy that's written a nice looking Smalltalk in Ruby that works perfectly well in the browser with rails I think.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > I cannot see how it could be worse than today. I fear it would turn out equivalent. The starting stack might have been better, but the promise of money to be made and competitive pressures would be the same. We would "worse-is-better" ourselves to roughly the same spot we're in today. Bloat, tracking and clickbait. Whenever I implore people to cut down on software bloat, I know what I'm really asking is, "fight against the market, slow the decay down just a little bit".
  - woadwarrior01 8y ago
    > I fear it would turn out equivalent. Only some 30 or so years earlier, and who knows what we'd have come up with, given such an early head start? I work in the space of dynamic language runtimes, and it hurts me to see how ideas pioneered by SmallTalk and subsequently the Self language[1] runtimes haven't yet been adopted by some of the more popular dynamic languages today. [1]: http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/implementation.pdf http://bibliography.selflanguage.org/_static/implementation....
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      The worse part is the insistence of Ruby and Python to keep JITs away from their canonical implementations. Sure there is PyPy and the "C JIT" on upcoming Ruby, but they don't seem to be widely deployed. Maybe with Graal and J9 focus on increasing support for dynamic languages, that will eventually change.
  - scroot 8y ago
    > I fear it would turn out equivalent. One argument against this is that the web today is not set up for easy authoring by end users (in fact, it's gotten more difficult to "make websites" as the web has progressed). But there was a hypermedia system around two decades ago that had authoring in mind from the start — hypercard — that could have been a good prototype for a "real web". If you have authoring as a primary consideration than perhaps one-directional, consumer oriented cultures of technology would not be so prominent. But who knows.
  - romaniv 8y ago
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
I've noticed this myself, and it makes me ashamed of modern computing honestly. It is as though the community has been taken over by some kind of religion that worships technology for its own sake. Technology is supposed to make our lives better, but there seems to be an increasing trend of sacrificing our own interests in service to increasing technological complexity, and these people embrace it.