4 ms·

Kays vision is like if we only had JavaScript drawing directly to the screen, and no HTML or any of the other web standards. In such a web we wouldn't have sear

by goto11 6y ago

Kays vision is like if we only had JavaScript drawing directly to the screen, and no HTML or any of the other web standards. In such a web we wouldn't have search engines, probably not even links. The object oriented paradigm (with data and behavior encapsulated in black-box objects) works fine for software systems, but it absolutely fails for large decentralized communication systems. TBL understood that and instead based the web on declarative data formats, and eliminated the behavior to a few verbs (GET, POST etc.) with constrained semantics. OOP is great when appropriate but it seems Kay doesn't recognize the limitations of the paradigm. Even Java have abandoned the strict object-dogmatism and embrace more data-oriented patterns.

chubot 6y ago
Yes exactly; I think of the web as a modest and humble (and thus brilliant) extension of Unix. It adds simple networking and hyperlinks to hierarchical namespaces (and extends hierarchical names as URLs). Those principles scale. GET/POST is basically the Unix/Plan 9 principle of read() / write() of declarative formats. On a small scale you can avoid that and use more tightly coupled RPC (and maybe you should), and you can design more elaborate VMs. On a large scale it all becomes REST (e.g. what do you talk to Github with, what does a Debian repo look like, etc.). It's less about the technical design and more about the social issues -- who owns each end of the wire? If you own both ends of the wire, you have a much different problem, but that's not the problem the web is solving. Previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131335 --- Funny thing about objects, I went back to my comment from 8 years ago and also noted that Kay was obsessed with "objects" in a way that's not useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5516960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5516960 When watching the Kay talk, I was struck that he seems to be lumping every "good" in software engineering under the term "object oriented". Virtual machines are objects. Servers are objects. Numbers should be objects. All abstraction is objects. It was not really a useful or enlightening way of thinking about the world.

by goto11 6y ago

chubot 6y ago

Yes exactly; I think of the web as a modest and humble (and thus brilliant) extension of Unix. It adds simple networking and hyperlinks to hierarchical namespaces (and extends hierarchical names as URLs). Those principles scale. GET/POST is basically the Unix/Plan 9 principle of read() / write() of declarative formats. On a small scale you can avoid that and use more tightly coupled RPC (and maybe you should), and you can design more elaborate VMs. On a large scale it all becomes REST (e.g. what do you talk to Github with, what does a Debian repo look like, etc.). It's less about the technical design and more about the social issues -- who owns each end of the wire? If you own both ends of the wire, you have a much different problem, but that's not the problem the web is solving. Previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131335 --- Funny thing about objects, I went back to my comment from 8 years ago and also noted that Kay was obsessed with "objects" in a way that's not useful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5516960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5516960 When watching the Kay talk, I was struck that he seems to be lumping every "good" in software engineering under the term "object oriented". Virtual machines are objects. Servers are objects. Numbers should be objects. All abstraction is objects. It was not really a useful or enlightening way of thinking about the world.