> We don’t have the Alan Kay / Free Software / Hypercard dream of everybody having control over their own computer because integrating with disparate APIs is re

> We don’t have the Alan Kay / Free Software / Hypercard dream of everybody having control over their own computer because integrating with disparate APIs is really fucking hard and takes a lot of work to do. APIs and distributed integration are hard. But the modern API landscape is a long long long way away from what Alan and folks were shooting for. Sure, you get the messaging part, but that research team wrote a number of papers, one of my favorite being Design Principles behind Smalltalk (https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/smalltalk....). When I read through the headlines there, I don’t feel like the modern API space lives up to those principles very well. To be clear, Alan Kay’s entire hypothesis may be flawed. I’m not asserting either way on that issue. I’m just pointing out that alluding that Alans dream didn’t work out because APIs are what he said and we’re miserable, doesn’t really follow, because there’s so much lacking in the rest of the picture.