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History needs to reevaluate Alan Kay as most of what he said was wrong. Here is a cringe worth talk from 1997 where he claims the internet is disfunctional bec

History needs to reevaluate Alan Kay as most of what he said was wrong. Here is a cringe worth talk from 1997 where he claims the internet is disfunctional because it nit standalone and that all developers should build their own tools and compilers. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

jerhewet 7y ago
> History needs to reevaluate Alan Kay You're being downvoted (as I expect I will be, for agreeing with you), but having lived through the time when people blindly worshiped Alan Kay, I could not agree more with this statement.
- t-h-e-chief 7y ago
  Ah. Alan Kay himself said that he feels they got the boundaries/sizing wrong when designing OO, so there really shouldn't be any mention of 'blind worship'. As far as I am aware, Kay has never been caught up in his own hubris.
  - mgummelt 7y ago
    source?
- mpweiher 7y ago
  Blind worship is always wrong. However, most admiration for Alan Kay's work is by knowledgeable people and for good reasons. Including the committee that decides on Turing awards... I am quite certain that my admiration for the man and his work is not blind. And do note that I described his construction as "brilliant" in my post, despite the fact that he ultimately got that part wrong.
mgummelt 7y ago
> where he claims the internet is disfunctional because it nit standalone Can you quote this or link to a timestamp? Searching these words in the transcript yields nothing.
edejong 7y ago
"HTML on the internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes there should be a browser that understands its format." This is the fundamental reason the modern internet is centralizing to a couple of entities. "This has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS." Yes, the modern browsers have taken us back at least 20 years when it comes to UI design, component based programming and distributed systems. The web is an endless stack of kludges, held together by duck-tape. I can back this up, in case you don't believe me. But, we should ask ourselves how it became such a stack of kludges. And I think Alan hits the nail on the head. "At the very least, every object should have a URL. I believe every object on the internet should have an IP. It represent much better what the actual abstracts are of the physical hardware to the bits. " Beautiful insight. The URL does not scale from a systems perspective. In my designs, I see myself often using UUIDs and negotiation to transfer knowledge about entities. The URL (and RESTful communication) is an annoyance. It fixates the location to something arbitrary. I can only use one hierarchy to denote the same object. I cannot easily renegotiate how the same things are named in my systems. And, the worst: the type of the object is often included in the url. `https://foo.bar/person/123` https://foo.bar/person/123` fixes the type 'person' to the object 123. URLs nowadays are an abomination. Most are not durable, contain excess information and suffer from projecting the information against an arbitrary axis. Finally, all developers should at least once have implemented their own compiler. It is not a hard experience at all and can be done in around 100 hours by someone with a medium skill in programming using a good text-book. It gives a truly fundamental insight into systems design and should simply not be skipped. W.r.t. tools: I assume any programmer worth his salt has build at least some of their tools! Perhaps I should start asking this at interviews. If you don't understand how your tools are built, how can you even begin thinking about building tools for others? And how can you understand, without attempting a crude build yourself? All the hard things are already done, the literature is there, the books are written. So, anyways, you make a bold claim: "most of what he said was wrong." This is awfully vague, I am afraid. Lets make it a challenge. Except for him making predictions, I challenge you to come up with a couple of statements from Alan Kay, and we'll discuss it.
- mgummelt 7y ago
  > This is the fundamental reason the modern internet is centralizing to a couple of entities The reason Google and Facebook dominate the internet has little to do with technology and much to do with economics, namely scale economies and network effects. > Yes, the modern browsers have taken us back at least 20 years when it comes to UI design. I'll grant that CSS is a mess. What else? > I can only use one hierarchy to denote the same object. You can create multiple URLs that point to the same object.

jerhewet 7y ago

> History needs to reevaluate Alan Kay You're being downvoted (as I expect I will be, for agreeing with you), but having lived through the time when people blindly worshiped Alan Kay, I could not agree more with this statement.

t-h-e-chief 7y ago
Ah. Alan Kay himself said that he feels they got the boundaries/sizing wrong when designing OO, so there really shouldn't be any mention of 'blind worship'. As far as I am aware, Kay has never been caught up in his own hubris.
- mgummelt 7y ago
  source?
mpweiher 7y ago
Blind worship is always wrong. However, most admiration for Alan Kay's work is by knowledgeable people and for good reasons. Including the committee that decides on Turing awards... I am quite certain that my admiration for the man and his work is not blind. And do note that I described his construction as "brilliant" in my post, despite the fact that he ultimately got that part wrong.

mgummelt 7y ago

> where he claims the internet is disfunctional because it nit standalone Can you quote this or link to a timestamp? Searching these words in the transcript yields nothing.

edejong 7y ago

"HTML on the internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes there should be a browser that understands its format." This is the fundamental reason the modern internet is centralizing to a couple of entities. "This has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS." Yes, the modern browsers have taken us back at least 20 years when it comes to UI design, component based programming and distributed systems. The web is an endless stack of kludges, held together by duck-tape. I can back this up, in case you don't believe me. But, we should ask ourselves how it became such a stack of kludges. And I think Alan hits the nail on the head. "At the very least, every object should have a URL. I believe every object on the internet should have an IP. It represent much better what the actual abstracts are of the physical hardware to the bits. " Beautiful insight. The URL does not scale from a systems perspective. In my designs, I see myself often using UUIDs and negotiation to transfer knowledge about entities. The URL (and RESTful communication) is an annoyance. It fixates the location to something arbitrary. I can only use one hierarchy to denote the same object. I cannot easily renegotiate how the same things are named in my systems. And, the worst: the type of the object is often included in the url. `https://foo.bar/person/123` https://foo.bar/person/123` fixes the type 'person' to the object 123. URLs nowadays are an abomination. Most are not durable, contain excess information and suffer from projecting the information against an arbitrary axis. Finally, all developers should at least once have implemented their own compiler. It is not a hard experience at all and can be done in around 100 hours by someone with a medium skill in programming using a good text-book. It gives a truly fundamental insight into systems design and should simply not be skipped. W.r.t. tools: I assume any programmer worth his salt has build at least some of their tools! Perhaps I should start asking this at interviews. If you don't understand how your tools are built, how can you even begin thinking about building tools for others? And how can you understand, without attempting a crude build yourself? All the hard things are already done, the literature is there, the books are written. So, anyways, you make a bold claim: "most of what he said was wrong." This is awfully vague, I am afraid. Lets make it a challenge. Except for him making predictions, I challenge you to come up with a couple of statements from Alan Kay, and we'll discuss it.

mgummelt 7y ago
> This is the fundamental reason the modern internet is centralizing to a couple of entities The reason Google and Facebook dominate the internet has little to do with technology and much to do with economics, namely scale economies and network effects. > Yes, the modern browsers have taken us back at least 20 years when it comes to UI design. I'll grant that CSS is a mess. What else? > I can only use one hierarchy to denote the same object. You can create multiple URLs that point to the same object.