Oh, boy! This interview has oodles more thought provoking stuff beyond the “Maxwell’s equations” quote. Sometimes I feel like we worship more than actually list

Oh, boy! This interview has oodles more thought provoking stuff beyond the “Maxwell’s equations” quote. Sometimes I feel like we worship more than actually listening to what is being said (and thinking about it and understanding it). > Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired together, and that next generation actually didn’t show up. One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects. You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture. > The user interface, which is still the predominant approach today, is a user interface as the access to function. If the area is interesting, you eventually wind up with something that looks like the control panel of a nuclear reactor. So this is the agglutination of features. [...] Corporate buyers often buy in terms of feature sets. But at PARC our idea was, since you never step in the same river twice, the number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment—something that’s explorable in various ways, something that is going to change over the lifetime of the user using this environment. New things are going to come on, and what does it mean for those new things to happen? This means improvements not only in the applications but also in the user interface itself. > SF — What do you wish you had done differently in the Smalltalk era? AK — I had the world’s greatest group, and I should have made the world’s two greatest groups. I didn’t realize there are benefits to having real implementers and real users, and there are benefits to starting from scratch every few months. I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor finisher, but it took me a long time to realize that I was interfering with them by trying to improve things.