I've heard this before, and I responded to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513147 (2013) Anyway, a

I've heard this before, and I responded to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5513147 (2013) Anyway, as I recall, Kay is making essentially the exact same argument as the Adobe guy, and the way he said it in that talk (Programming and Scaling, thanks below) displays astonishing ignorance for such a brilliant guy. If Kay is right, then he should just create a web that is based on a VM. And then he can see how far it goes. It will never go anywhere because it will be broken by design. And I'll elaborate on that and say that Kay's designs are probably brilliant for small scales, but not for large scales and heterogeneous problems. It's easier to design something for a small scale. You can get a more coherent result that feels nicer locally. But the whole point of the web is large scale -- WORLD WIDE was in fact TBL's original vision (e.g. see original proposals linked below). That's a much more constrained and thus harder design problem. Also related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10644076 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10644076 (2015) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131335 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131335 (2013) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14035411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14035411 (2017) (I might make a blog post out of this)