In the 80s/90s era that these ideas are rooted in, an "object" means both code and data fused together. In this worldview JSON is not a way to send objects desp

In the 80s/90s era that these ideas are rooted in, an "object" means both code and data fused together. In this worldview JSON is not a way to send objects despite the name, it's a way to send structs. In the sense Kay means, sending an object implies receiving a thing that implements one or more interfaces, on which you call methods/send messages, and then stuff happens. The data held by the object is encapsulated. What Java was trying to do with RMI, classloaders, etc was a lot closer to this vision because in that mechanism you could actually receive over the network a full object with both code and data, in which the actual underlying data structure was something you'd never seen before but it didn't matter as long as it implemented an interface you recognized, because the code to process the data came with it. This vision hit a number of practical engineering problems, most obviously security and less obviously the pervasive assumption of flat fast LAN-like networks that the CORBA/RMI/DCOM/etc people kept making. The web won out over this vision partly because it was simple enough to reimplement. When Tim Berners-Lee didn't have the resources to take it to the full potential (not even having proper inline images) NCSA Mosaic took over, then Netscape took over from them, then Microsoft from Netscape, then Chrome/Safari from Microsoft. The history of the web is basically a history of failed business models up until Google decides to just subsidize the whole thing in order to drive search traffic.