“his conception of the World Wide Web was infinitely tinier and weaker and terrible. His thing was simple enough with other unsophisticated people to wind up becoming a de facto standard, which we’re still suffering from. You know, [HTML is] terrible and most people can’t see it.”
I assume you're posting this to show that Kay "doesn't get it"?
The more I learn about cutting-edge technologies of the 60s, 70s and 80s, the more I'm convinced that he's entirely correct about the web and mobile. Most developers today are obsessed with tooling and features. Almost no one seems to care whether those tools and features have some kind of fundamentally valid idea behind them.
Just look at the proliferation of HTTP security headers for a clear-cut example of how this works out in the long run.
Considering a whole Smalltalk VM is smaller than a lot of hero images on websites, I get the feeling that Kay is correct. I would imagine a containerized / sandboxed environment would have developed. I cannot see how it could be worse than today.
I fear it would turn out equivalent. The starting stack might have been better, but the promise of money to be made and competitive pressures would be the same. We would "worse-is-better" ourselves to roughly the same spot we're in today. Bloat, tracking and clickbait.
Whenever I implore people to cut down on software bloat, I know what I'm really asking is, "fight against the market, slow the decay down just a little bit".
Only some 30 or so years earlier, and who knows what we'd have come up with, given such an early head start?
I work in the space of dynamic language runtimes, and it hurts me to see how ideas pioneered by SmallTalk and subsequently the Self language[1] runtimes haven't yet been adopted by some of the more popular dynamic languages today.
One argument against this is that the web today is not set up for easy authoring by end users (in fact, it's gotten more difficult to "make websites" as the web has progressed). But there was a hypermedia system around two decades ago that had authoring in mind from the start — hypercard — that could have been a good prototype for a "real web".
If you have authoring as a primary consideration than perhaps one-directional, consumer oriented cultures of technology would not be so prominent. But who knows.
I doubt it. Smalltalk had coherent design that anticipated many needs that the web faces today (and computers in general). What we get in ad-hoc piecemeal additions would be an organic part of the overall infrastructure.
I recently started experimenting with Squeak. It's a bit dated, but holy crap, that thing is amazing. So many good ideas packed in so few megabytes. The startup time alone blows my mind. It's pretty much a virtual machine with a sort-of-operating-system that runs an IDE for all of its own source code, and it loads faster than 95% of all vanilla desktop apps I use today.
They are still using bitmapped graphics under the hood, which explains some of the limitation. The community has shrunk, which means there's no one to take them to the world of vector. However, Pharo people are implementing a new vector engine called Bloc.
>They are still using bitmapped graphics under the hood, which explains some of the limitation. The community has shrunk, which means there's no one to take them to the world of vector.
Most (all?) commercial OSes don't use vectors for their GUIs either.
I've noticed this myself, and it makes me ashamed of modern computing honestly. It is as though the community has been taken over by some kind of religion that worships technology for its own sake. Technology is supposed to make our lives better, but there seems to be an increasing trend of sacrificing our own interests in service to increasing technological complexity, and these people embrace it.
“his conception of the World Wide Web was infinitely tinier and weaker and terrible. His thing was simple enough with other unsophisticated people to wind up becoming a de facto standard, which we’re still suffering from. You know, [HTML is] terrible and most people can’t see it.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...