5 ms·

The answer for me is pretty easy: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet by Alan Kay. The OOPSLA '97 keynote speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1

by jgon 14y ago

The answer for me is pretty easy: The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet by Alan Kay. The OOPSLA '97 keynote speech. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY Great for repeated watching, I get something new from it every time I watch it. It is also great for recalibrating your point of view from amazement at whatever the current trend is in technology, to a more long-term outlook as well as encouraging higher standards for what is currently available. I think this shift in outlook is important for technologists like us, because it easy to become immersed in the day to day goings-on of tech and become myopic in a way. Using the invention of the printing press and literacy, etc, etc is a great way to reorient your attitude towards technology and what it can/should do.

chubot 14y ago
Is this the one where he says the web was designed by amateurs and it should have been a virtual machine instead? He says they did a better web 30 years before or something to that effect. If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others. Without going too much into detail, if he believes this, then he can't possibly understand Tim Berner-Lee's principle of least privilege. And that the web would have never become ubiquitous, e.g. made the jump from PCs to mobile, in his bizarre universe.
- jgon 14y ago
  That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk. I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of his remarks. I will say that I think Kay explicitly agrees with the principle of least privilege (Rule of Least Power according to wikipedia) and calls that out in his talk. I see no way in which the ever-enlarging html,css, and javascript standards embody what Berners-Lee was talking about, especially when they still don't offer nearly the functionality that an OS offers currently. You can tell this because there are really only 4 organizations capable of creating a full browser and they happen to be mostly the largest tech corporations on the planet. If you need those kinds of resources to be able to implement the web today, how can this ever be considered "Least Power"? I suspect that in 10 years the W3C will have added so much more functionality to the various standards in an attempt to make them somewhat at parity with native development that browsers will collapse under their own weight as they try to implement what is basically an OS (this really became explicit when Chrome started using processes to "protect" tabs. Sound familiar?). The web as it exists today is a huge pile of hodge-podge conflicting standards, none of which are remotely close to offering the level of development performance for apps rather than pages that you can get with any desktop toolkit. Alan is fully behind the "idea" of the web, but is taking the long-term, and I believe correct, view that this cannot continue as it is and we would be well served by trying do something about it by conscious effort rather than evolving half-heartedly in that direction.
  - dasil003 14y ago
    And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      I used to think differently, but my time on HN has persuaded me that I'm wrong. I now agree with you. I do miss the "Write it according to the specs and publish it, and anyone on any browser, any OS, any machine, any display type, can access it" attitude. Some people really do need to re-learn the universality of the www, instead of fencing off content inside apps. (Why do newspapers insist on really poor online versions, and mobile versions, and app versions?)
    - jules 14y ago
      The web can, and will continue to accumulate stuff. You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. It's definitely not inconceivable that somebody will build Kay's VM vision as an abstraction layer on top of web technologies, so that at least we no longer have to deal with the mess in each and every web application separately. If such a VM becomes popular enough we can implement said VM directly instead of on top of existing web technologies.
      - dasil003 14y ago
        > You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. You can't clean up a mess by adding layers, but you can replace layers (eg. you can add web sockets and start driving real time apps that way). Therefore incremental improvement is possible essentially forever. > There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. Agreed. However it's not just accidental either. The web is many things to many people. It's not like cross-platform GUI toolkits failed for lack of trying, but the fact is that they could not reproduce the advantages that the web had in the very beginning. Specifically, it was comically easy to create content and even a browser on any platform in those early days. Obviously over the next decade web tech was severely abused to shoehorn application functionality where it was never intended, and ends up being more complex in the long run. However the number and utility of the dead simple documents is absolutely massive. That, combined with a defacto standard for creating server apps without installation that is perfectly accessible to a layman (theoretically with any disability as well) was the wedge that GUI toolkits never came close to having. Your idea about building a new abstract layer on top of existing web technologies and then reimplementing it natively is the most credible idea I've heard about how the web could be supplanted, and I certainly wouldn't bet against that happening over the coming decades. However I think the web should be a textbook example of how worse is better is not just a conciliatory platitude for disgruntled engineers, but as an actual requirement for certain classes of technology to gain critical mass.
- espeed 14y ago
  That line is in the "Programming and Scaling" talk: http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
- coldtea 14y ago
  >If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others. I don't see how he can be wrong. The point he made wasn't that the things they did in the 70s were better than today's web or UIs. Just that people (and companies) should have invested in THAT line of work, and building on THOSE principles, instead of making a mess with reinventing the wheel, competing on BS differentiators and cutting off research. I'd take my OS X or an Ubuntu desktop over any Xerox guy of the time, any day of the week. But I'd take the volume of research, innovation, insights and coherence that they had at the time over today's ho-hum idea of development too. Despite having all those things 30 years ago, it took 30 years for them to become mainstream -- and far fewer stuff emerged since. And not for lack of CPU resources. Even something like BeOS could offer a 2005 desktop experience in 1996. The most wide innovation mover in the 00's was Apple. And even they, they mostly worked on market innovation (ie. repackage older niche stuff in a way that finally makes people want to use them, instead of a jumbled mess), not on research innovation.
  - chubot 14y ago
    Read my response above; you're not addressing the point he makes that the web should have been based on a VM. That's what I'm saying is wronger than wrong. If their line of research is based on distributing content over VMs, then that's completely different than the web's design philosophy, and it's probably THE reason his ideas never were adopted while the web was. Those design ideas are diametrically opposed. The design of the web won, for that specific reason. It was BETTER rather than worse, as he claims. I was astonished during the talk that he never reflected on why his ideas in this area weren't successful while the web was. It is NOT because the designers of the web are idiots or amateurs. That is specifically what he claims.
    - coldtea 14y ago
      Your whole premise is that his ideas "weren't successful", whereas I see it more as a case of "Greenspun's tenth rule". That is: tt's not that the VMs lost and the web won. It's the web started from something that wasn't adequate for what we wanted, and after all these years it has been adding all kinds of kludgy, warty and half-baked implementations of VM features. In essence, instead of designing a proper web-as-VM from the start (and slowly evolve it as capabilities of networks and CPUs increase) we started with Lee's document based thing, that we soon found out is barely enough, and we have to have video, sound, app capabilities, process isolation, maybe a common bytecode, networking, real-time, etc. I.e we started from dumb documents we links, when what we wanted was a VM. And now we have twisted the dump document model to sorta kinda look like a VM. How many times have you heard that "the browser is the new OS" and such? So, it's a Greenspun's tenth rule, only instead of Lisp we build an ad-hoc, bug-ridden, clumsy version of Alan Kay's, Doug Engelbart, etc, ideas.
- Confusion 14y ago
  I either don't understand your point or I don't understand Kay's idea, because: javascript is Turing complete and runs in a VM/sandbox?
  - chubot 14y ago
    If you have JavaScript, "technically" HTML, CSS, XML, and JSON are unnecessary. You can write programs to print and layout text (that's essentially what a PDF file is), and programs can emit and compute data as well. Kay specifically calls out HTML as a "step backward" for this reason (although he is simply wrong as I've said). He wants a web based entirely on executable code. Yes, it sounds dumb prima facie but that's what he has said consistently over a long period of time.
chubot 14y ago
FWIW I just watched this talk, and tried to judge it apart from my opinion that he is totally wrong about the web. I think Kay is one of the most interesting speakers in CS; he's a learned man. But I didn't find the content that great. If you want some thoughts on software architecture, programming languages, with a lot of great cultural references outside the field, I much prefer the thoughts of Richard Gabriel: http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html If you search for his work on "ultra large scale systems", it is a lot more thought provoking than what Kay offers, and it is a lot more specific at the same time. 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. I know OOP has a different definition than what he intended with SmallTalk, but he didn't invent modularity. For example, Unix is highly modular but not object-oriented, and it predates his ideas.

by jgon 14y ago

chubot 14y ago

Is this the one where he says the web was designed by amateurs and it should have been a virtual machine instead? He says they did a better web 30 years before or something to that effect. If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others. Without going too much into detail, if he believes this, then he can't possibly understand Tim Berner-Lee's principle of least privilege. And that the web would have never become ubiquitous, e.g. made the jump from PCs to mobile, in his bizarre universe.

jgon 14y ago
That exact quote is from a more recent talk of his, but he does mention the web and his current distaste for the design principles it embodies. I would encourage you to still watch the talk as it his criticism of the web is an incredibly small portion of the overall talk. I wish that you had included more substance in your criticisms so I could have either agreed with you, disagreed, or explained my interpretation of his remarks. I will say that I think Kay explicitly agrees with the principle of least privilege (Rule of Least Power according to wikipedia) and calls that out in his talk. I see no way in which the ever-enlarging html,css, and javascript standards embody what Berners-Lee was talking about, especially when they still don't offer nearly the functionality that an OS offers currently. You can tell this because there are really only 4 organizations capable of creating a full browser and they happen to be mostly the largest tech corporations on the planet. If you need those kinds of resources to be able to implement the web today, how can this ever be considered "Least Power"? I suspect that in 10 years the W3C will have added so much more functionality to the various standards in an attempt to make them somewhat at parity with native development that browsers will collapse under their own weight as they try to implement what is basically an OS (this really became explicit when Chrome started using processes to "protect" tabs. Sound familiar?). The web as it exists today is a huge pile of hodge-podge conflicting standards, none of which are remotely close to offering the level of development performance for apps rather than pages that you can get with any desktop toolkit. Alan is fully behind the "idea" of the web, but is taking the long-term, and I believe correct, view that this cannot continue as it is and we would be well served by trying do something about it by conscious effort rather than evolving half-heartedly in that direction.
- dasil003 14y ago
  And yet no desktop toolkit has ever approached the ubiquity and deployability of the web. However much of a hodgepodge the web is, it can and will continue to improve incrementally, whereas the a GUI toolkit no matter how technically superior can never cross the chasm to ubiquity, wring your hands though you might.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    I used to think differently, but my time on HN has persuaded me that I'm wrong. I now agree with you. I do miss the "Write it according to the specs and publish it, and anyone on any browser, any OS, any machine, any display type, can access it" attitude. Some people really do need to re-learn the universality of the www, instead of fencing off content inside apps. (Why do newspapers insist on really poor online versions, and mobile versions, and app versions?)
  - jules 14y ago
    The web can, and will continue to accumulate stuff. You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. It's definitely not inconceivable that somebody will build Kay's VM vision as an abstraction layer on top of web technologies, so that at least we no longer have to deal with the mess in each and every web application separately. If such a VM becomes popular enough we can implement said VM directly instead of on top of existing web technologies.
    - dasil003 14y ago
      > You can't clean up a mess by accumulating more stuff. You can't clean up a mess by adding layers, but you can replace layers (eg. you can add web sockets and start driving real time apps that way). Therefore incremental improvement is possible essentially forever. > There is no technical reason why a proper GUI framework couldn't be as ubiquitous as HTML+CSS+JS+SVG+etc, except that historically it didn't happen that way. Agreed. However it's not just accidental either. The web is many things to many people. It's not like cross-platform GUI toolkits failed for lack of trying, but the fact is that they could not reproduce the advantages that the web had in the very beginning. Specifically, it was comically easy to create content and even a browser on any platform in those early days. Obviously over the next decade web tech was severely abused to shoehorn application functionality where it was never intended, and ends up being more complex in the long run. However the number and utility of the dead simple documents is absolutely massive. That, combined with a defacto standard for creating server apps without installation that is perfectly accessible to a layman (theoretically with any disability as well) was the wedge that GUI toolkits never came close to having. Your idea about building a new abstract layer on top of existing web technologies and then reimplementing it natively is the most credible idea I've heard about how the web could be supplanted, and I certainly wouldn't bet against that happening over the coming decades. However I think the web should be a textbook example of how worse is better is not just a conciliatory platitude for disgruntled engineers, but as an actual requirement for certain classes of technology to gain critical mass.
espeed 14y ago
That line is in the "Programming and Scaling" talk: http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/ http://www.tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/
coldtea 14y ago
>If so I'll commit blasphemy and say he's wronger than wrong. I was especially offended that a curious person would display such ignorance in understanding the work of others. I don't see how he can be wrong. The point he made wasn't that the things they did in the 70s were better than today's web or UIs. Just that people (and companies) should have invested in THAT line of work, and building on THOSE principles, instead of making a mess with reinventing the wheel, competing on BS differentiators and cutting off research. I'd take my OS X or an Ubuntu desktop over any Xerox guy of the time, any day of the week. But I'd take the volume of research, innovation, insights and coherence that they had at the time over today's ho-hum idea of development too. Despite having all those things 30 years ago, it took 30 years for them to become mainstream -- and far fewer stuff emerged since. And not for lack of CPU resources. Even something like BeOS could offer a 2005 desktop experience in 1996. The most wide innovation mover in the 00's was Apple. And even they, they mostly worked on market innovation (ie. repackage older niche stuff in a way that finally makes people want to use them, instead of a jumbled mess), not on research innovation.
- chubot 14y ago
  Read my response above; you're not addressing the point he makes that the web should have been based on a VM. That's what I'm saying is wronger than wrong. If their line of research is based on distributing content over VMs, then that's completely different than the web's design philosophy, and it's probably THE reason his ideas never were adopted while the web was. Those design ideas are diametrically opposed. The design of the web won, for that specific reason. It was BETTER rather than worse, as he claims. I was astonished during the talk that he never reflected on why his ideas in this area weren't successful while the web was. It is NOT because the designers of the web are idiots or amateurs. That is specifically what he claims.
  - coldtea 14y ago
    Your whole premise is that his ideas "weren't successful", whereas I see it more as a case of "Greenspun's tenth rule". That is: tt's not that the VMs lost and the web won. It's the web started from something that wasn't adequate for what we wanted, and after all these years it has been adding all kinds of kludgy, warty and half-baked implementations of VM features. In essence, instead of designing a proper web-as-VM from the start (and slowly evolve it as capabilities of networks and CPUs increase) we started with Lee's document based thing, that we soon found out is barely enough, and we have to have video, sound, app capabilities, process isolation, maybe a common bytecode, networking, real-time, etc. I.e we started from dumb documents we links, when what we wanted was a VM. And now we have twisted the dump document model to sorta kinda look like a VM. How many times have you heard that "the browser is the new OS" and such? So, it's a Greenspun's tenth rule, only instead of Lisp we build an ad-hoc, bug-ridden, clumsy version of Alan Kay's, Doug Engelbart, etc, ideas.
Confusion 14y ago
I either don't understand your point or I don't understand Kay's idea, because: javascript is Turing complete and runs in a VM/sandbox?
- chubot 14y ago
  If you have JavaScript, "technically" HTML, CSS, XML, and JSON are unnecessary. You can write programs to print and layout text (that's essentially what a PDF file is), and programs can emit and compute data as well. Kay specifically calls out HTML as a "step backward" for this reason (although he is simply wrong as I've said). He wants a web based entirely on executable code. Yes, it sounds dumb prima facie but that's what he has said consistently over a long period of time.

chubot 14y ago

FWIW I just watched this talk, and tried to judge it apart from my opinion that he is totally wrong about the web. I think Kay is one of the most interesting speakers in CS; he's a learned man. But I didn't find the content that great. If you want some thoughts on software architecture, programming languages, with a lot of great cultural references outside the field, I much prefer the thoughts of Richard Gabriel: http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html http://www.dreamsongs.com/Essays.html If you search for his work on "ultra large scale systems", it is a lot more thought provoking than what Kay offers, and it is a lot more specific at the same time. 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. I know OOP has a different definition than what he intended with SmallTalk, but he didn't invent modularity. For example, Unix is highly modular but not object-oriented, and it predates his ideas.