Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet

operating systems which are totally transparent and easily understood by their users I sort of glossed over this part so now I have a chance to elaborate. Alan Kay has put a ton of thought into this issue [1]. He firmly believes that we can build an operating system and application software with an extremely small footprint (LOC's) so that a single person can understand the whole thing. Since he gave that talk, we've moved further and further away from Kay's vision. We've made things more and more complex, opaque, centralized, and difficult to change. We've given away our future to big tech companies. Heck, we've even given away the past. We've lost much of the freedom we had back in the 90's, let alone the 70's and 80's when Kay did so much of his work. We're going to have to work incredibly hard just to regain what we've lost. [1] [this video]

The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet , OOPSLA 1997 keynote [this video] Others have already mentioned The Early History of Smalltalk , highly recommended. You'll probably want to read it a couple of times, revisit from time to time. The big idea is messaging, or rather "ma" [link] "The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be." "I think I recall also pointing out that it is vitally important not just to have a complete metasystem, but to have fences that help guard the crossing of metaboundaries." " I would say that a system that allowed other metathings to be done in the ordinary course of programming (like changing what inheritance means, or what is an instance) is a bad design. (I believe that systems should allow these things, but the design should be such that there are clear fences that have to be crossed when serious extensions are made.)" "I would suggest that more progress could be made if the smart and talented Squeak list would think more about what the next step in metaprogramming should be -- how can we get great power, parsimony, AND security of meaning?"

I should just probably say, clearly you haven't seen Common Lisp's defpackage, modules are actually first class objects there and are completely decoupled from the file system. But most importantly as Barbara Liskov mentions in this video[1] we don't know what is a module exactly or how to use them yet. Which is an specific statement aligned with Alan Kay's famous "We don't know how to design systems so let's not turn it into a religion yet."[2] tl;dr; 1) Innovation is good. 2) Javascript's module is a half assed implementation of Common Lisp's defpackage. (Don't get me wrong is still way better than Python's abhorrent ninja goto: import) [1]: [link] [2]: [this video]

The Alan Kay reference is from his OOPSLA'97 talk [2], where he says that he's "apologized profusely over the last 20 years for introducing the term 'object oriented'" and suggests that the Japanese notion of "Ma" or "the unseen stuff that goes between objects" as what is important. (edit) [3] is a quote from a communication with Kay in 2003 - "OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them." [2] [this video] (around 38minutes) [3] [link]

Kay is said to have coined the term "object-oriented", but his conception of object orientation differs considerably from that of Dahl and Nygaard as well as from all current OO languages. Dahl and Nygaard invented the first object-oriented programming language (Simula 67) but didn't use the term. And yes, active objects reacting to messages (events) passed to them were already part of Simula I (1962). The referenced article - like many others - moreover quotes Kay incompletely; Kay in the sentence next to the one quoted in the article said " the important thing here is that I have many of the same feelings about Smalltalk "; see [this video] . Smalltalk-76 and 80 (in contrast to Smalltalk-72) implement inheritance and virtual methods as it was done in Simula 67, just like C++ and Java do.

This is an extremely difficult question that I've been grappling with myself. My first strategy is to create writings that can't be summarized. I try to make essays that are dripping with idiosyncrasy. I can't win in an information war, but I can stay competitive for ~10 years in a creative clash: [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] [link] [4] [link] [5] [link] I myself draw lots of my inspiration from my "sages of style", in the same way that AIs will try to replicate my voice. None of these great thinkers can be summarized or replicated in any meaningful way: [6] David Foster Wallace: [link] [7] George Carlin: [link] [8] Derek Sivers: [link] [9] John Green: [link] [10] Roman Mars: [link] [11] Alan Kay: [this video] [12] Alan Watts: [link] [13] Richard Feynman: [link] [14] Raymond Smullyan: [link] But style only takes you so far. My second strategy is to socialize IRL. This year, I'm starting a tech conference called "Outland" to foster community in an age where community might be all that matters. [15] [link]