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

Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: ▶ this video If you want to see what "practical" OOP looked like in the 80s, this is a good video: link

You should check out Alan Kay's OOPSLA keynote "The Compute Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" at ▶ this video specifically about 20 mintues in where he says that a browser should be exactly what you say here. On the one hand, he was talking about this almost 20 years ago, on the other hand you're in good company because he's a pretty smart guy! I encourage all developers to watch that talk and do some thinking about the current state of our practice and where we want to go from here.

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?"

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

I recently (re)discovered Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA talk: ▶ this video For others that have been following his work (and talks), it doesn't really contain much new stuff, but the context of a talk to an audience of programmers brings out some different contexts. He touches on the the fact that they didn't "just" spend extra money to prototype the dynabook in the form of the Alto - but they built 2000 machines - and part of that is of course so they could invite (among others) whole classes of school children to come and play with the tech.

No, compared to the early vision (1950s/60s) of computers as metatools that humans can use to augment their cognition. The current crop of mobile devices (and even most desktop devices) are nowhere nearer to that glorious goal. See his OOPSLA talk "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet" - ▶ this video

I would agree with that if there were no distinction between clients and servers. i.e. agents and LLMs are resources that should be discovered and exploited in the same exact way as anything else, and switchable in the same ways. The whole thing reminds me of stuff like Alan Kay's legendary OOPSLA talk in 1997 ( ▶ this video ) "Every object should have an IP" (Also "Arrogance in computer science is measured in nano Dijkstras").

For people who want to learn biochemsistry and subsequently be in awe and the complexity and mechanisms, there's a great beginner book, The Machinery of Life. link I found my way there after an Alan Kay video -- OPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet: ▶ this video On the subject of awe, here's another from Kurszsegat - The Most Complex Language in the World: link

Here's Alan Kay lavishing praise minute 54 ▶ this video on "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol" link

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

"I really would like you to contrast that with what you have to do with HTML on the Internet. Think about it. HTML on the Internet has gone back to the dark ages because it presupposes that there should be a browser that should understand its formats. This has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS." -- ▶ this video

The Art of metaobject protocol In his 1997 talk at OOPSLA, Alan Kay called it "the best book anybody's written in ten years", and contended that it contained "some of the most profound insights, and the most practical insights about OOP", but was dismayed that it was written in a highly Lisp-centric and CLOS-specific fashion, calling it "a hard book for most people to read; if you don't know the Lisp culture, it's very hard to read" [2] [1] link [2] ▶ this video