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Besides Case and Hart's piece, we have a few other concrete examples of how computing could be a medium for understanding systems.

Only a few? There are a lot of them, actually. Games are starting to become these, particularly ones which encourage exploration and making, like Minecraft. I think we're only at the beginning of our exploration of the craft of emergent sandbox worlds. We're probably at an analogous stage in emergent sandbox worlds as the cartoon doodles found on Japanese temple beams from around 1200 years ago. One day, we'll get to the sandbox world equivalent of "The Watchmen."

Eh what? It's a reference. The year has no other meaning than to account for when the referenced work was published, which was in 2007.

There's no rule that says the author must find Kay's talk to be more compelling than his VPRI memo, and it isn't evidence that the paper was poorly researched.