4 ms·

That makes me remember the now famous quote: The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rath

That makes me remember the now famous quote: The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error- -free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. -- Alan Kay

raldi 12y ago
What year is that quote from?
- mirkules 12y ago
  2012: the full interview is here: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442?pgno=1 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... The complete quote: Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz. Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. Edit to add some context: Kay: Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like Microsoft Word is. Word was done in 1984. HyperCard was 1989. Find me Web pages that are even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after that, but it was done by people who had no imagination. They were just trying to satisfy an immediate need. There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have something like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de facto standards — in this case, really bad de facto standards. Because what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.
  - nickstefan12 12y ago
    It's amazing how much harder a decent wysiwyg is to make in web technologies than you'd think. Content editable was supposed to get us there, but needs a ton of override. Grouping key and click events into actions the way youd expect ms word to function is again not easy!
    - mirkules 12y ago
      It is difficult, I agree. But that's not really the point Kay is trying to make. Why should we implement these things in the web browser? Further in the interview, Kay remarks that that is exactly the problem - that we are reinventing technologies that were around for decades (reinventing them poorly to boot, as he puts it "reinventing a flat tire"). I happen to agree with him in theory: I think it's a huge missed opportunity to force the browser to be an application delivery mechanism instead of a content-delivery mechanism (or "object"-delivery as he puts it). But of course in practice, there are historical and political reasons as to why web-as-an-app-delivery-mechanism happened, not least of which - if we took Kay's example of MS Word - is Microsoft's unwillingness to open up the platform (or proprietary software, in general). So we had to re-solve these problems in non-proprietary ways, while forcing proprietary app providers to conform to web standards that would ultimately and perhaps knowingly cannibalize their software sales.
- bootload 12y ago
  @raldi, "Interview with Alan Kay", 2012JUL10 ~ http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... and another on ars that talks around this quote ~ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/parsing-the-difference-between-the-internet-and-the-web-according-to-alan-kay/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/parsin...

raldi 12y ago

What year is that quote from?

mirkules 12y ago
2012: the full interview is here: http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442?pgno=1 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... The complete quote: Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure in knowing the history of jazz. Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. Edit to add some context: Kay: Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like Microsoft Word is. Word was done in 1984. HyperCard was 1989. Find me Web pages that are even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after that, but it was done by people who had no imagination. They were just trying to satisfy an immediate need. There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have something like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de facto standards — in this case, really bad de facto standards. Because what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.
- nickstefan12 12y ago
  It's amazing how much harder a decent wysiwyg is to make in web technologies than you'd think. Content editable was supposed to get us there, but needs a ton of override. Grouping key and click events into actions the way youd expect ms word to function is again not easy!
  - mirkules 12y ago
    It is difficult, I agree. But that's not really the point Kay is trying to make. Why should we implement these things in the web browser? Further in the interview, Kay remarks that that is exactly the problem - that we are reinventing technologies that were around for decades (reinventing them poorly to boot, as he puts it "reinventing a flat tire"). I happen to agree with him in theory: I think it's a huge missed opportunity to force the browser to be an application delivery mechanism instead of a content-delivery mechanism (or "object"-delivery as he puts it). But of course in practice, there are historical and political reasons as to why web-as-an-app-delivery-mechanism happened, not least of which - if we took Kay's example of MS Word - is Microsoft's unwillingness to open up the platform (or proprietary software, in general). So we had to re-solve these problems in non-proprietary ways, while forcing proprietary app providers to conform to web standards that would ultimately and perhaps knowingly cannibalize their software sales.
bootload 12y ago
@raldi, "Interview with Alan Kay", 2012JUL10 ~ http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... and another on ars that talks around this quote ~ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/parsing-the-difference-between-the-internet-and-the-web-according-to-alan-kay/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/06/parsin...