We need to acknowledge that this particular field of, let's be generous and call it engineering, we are talking about is, for the most part, slow-moving and rat

We need to acknowledge that this particular field of, let's be generous and call it engineering, we are talking about is, for the most part, slow-moving and rather backwards to begin with. It's also shaped by forces and concerns that are suboptimal. As I wrote in the past: "Software Engineering must be the only engineering discipline where mastery of tools and barrier to entry in terms of skills are in many ways inversely correlated with market demands. Every clown can write software these days and in fact a lot of clowns get paid six figure salaries to do so. When the domain is largely composed of clowns, standards become extinct and one finds oneself calibrating for a circus." This is very important when we think about certain ideas expressed by geniuses that are so far ahead of their time that even smart people don't understand them. Unfortunately this seems to have happened to Alan Kay and his ideas. Maybe in 50 or 100 years, the modern software engineering race-to-the-bottom culture will have evolved enough (or more realistically, either exhausted dead-end paradigms or slammed into one unfathomable disaster or another) to appreciate them.