Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

I think a big point here is that going to a network culture doesn't mandate losing narrative, it just makes the probability much higher for people who are not self-conscious about their surrounding contexts. If we take a look at Socrates (portrayed as an oral culture genius) complaining about writing -- e.g. it removes the need to remember and so we will lose this, etc. -- we also have to realize that we are reading this from a very good early writer in Plato. Both of them loved irony, and if we look at this from that point of view, Plato is actually saying "Guess what? If you -decide- to remember while reading then you get the best of both worlds -- you'll get the stuff between your ears where it will do you the most good -and- you will have gotten it many times faster than listening, usually in a better form, and from many more resources than oral culture provides".

This was the idea in the 60s: provide something much better -- and by the way it includes narrative and new possibilities for narrative -- but then like reading and writing, teach what it is in the schools so that a pop culture version which misses most of the new powers is avoided.

But the larger point here is that if one is dealing with dynamic objects as originally intended, the objects can help greatly and safely in coordinating them. This shouldn't be more difficult than what we do in combining ordinary materials in our physical world (it should be even simpler!).

In the system used for the demo -- Smalltalk-78 -- every thing in the system is a dynamic object -- there are no "date structures". This means in part that each object, besides doing its main purpose, can also provide useful help in using it, can include general protocols for "mashing up", etc.

We can do better today, but my whole point in the interview and in these comments is that once e.g. Engelbart showed us great ideas for personal computing, we should not adopt worse ideas (why would any reasonable people do this?), once dynamic media has been demonstrated in a comprehensive way, we should not go back to imitating static media in ways that preclude dynamic media (if you have dynamic media you can do static media but not vice versa!).

Going back and doing Engelbart or Parc also makes no sense, because we have vastly more computing resources today than 50 years ago. We need to go forward -- and -to think things through- ! -- about what computers are, what we are, and how to use the best of both in powerful combinations. This was Licklider's dream from 1960, and some of it was built. The dream is still central to our thinking today because it was so large and good to be always beckoning us ahead.

The "it's a start" reply, which is often heard when criticizing actions in education which will get nowhere (or worse, dig the hole deeper) is part of several fallacies about "making progress": the idea that "if we just iterate enough" we will get to the levels of improvement needed. Any biologist will point out that "Darwinian processes" don't optimize, they just find fits to the environment. So if the environment is weak you will get good fits that are weak.

A "being more tough" way to think about this is what I've called in talks "the MacCready Sweet Spot" -- it's the threshold above the "merely better" where something important is different. For example, consider reading scores. They can go up or down, but unless a kid gets over the threshold of "reading for meaning" rather than deciphering codes, none of the ups and downs below count. For a whole population, the US is generally under the needed threshold for reading, and that is the systemic problem that needs to be worked on (not raising the scores a few points).

To stay on this example, we find studies that show it is very hard to learn to read fluently after we've learned oral language fluently. Montessori homed in on this earlier than most, and it has since been confirmed more rigorously. And this is the case for many new things that we need to get fluent at and above threshold.

So at the systems level of thinking we should be putting enormous resources into reforming the elementary grades rather than trying to "fix" high schools.

And so forth. This is the logic behind building dams and levees and installing pumps and runoff paths before flooding. One recent study indicated that the costs of prevention are 20% of the costs of disaster.

We could add to (d) above the real difficulties humans have of imagining certain kinds of things: we have no trouble with imagining gods, demons, witches, etc. but can't get ourselves beforehand into the "go all out" state of mind we have during an actual disaster (where heroes show up from everywhere). The very same people mostly can't take action when there isn't a disaster right in front of them.

This is very human. But, as I've pointed out elsewhere, part of "civilization" is to learn how to "do better than human" for hard to learn things.

The simplest ways to think about all this is through the "Human Universals" ideas (more nicely put than "Lord of the Flies"!). Our natural tendencies via genetics and some remnants in our common sense culture is to be oral, social,tribal, act like hunter-gatherers, etc. (With reference to the last idea, consider the general behavior of businesses, of "shopping", etc.)

It's not about "creativity" per se -- this has been misunderstood. It's about helping children become part of the "large conversation" beyond just vocational training. (Consider adding becoming a citizen, responsibilities to growing the next generation (whether or not you have children), gathering and participating in "richness of life", etc.)

I've run into this very thing. The ironic thing about it is advocating for literacy, and understanding the abstract inventions of our civilization is the antithesis of elitism, because think about what would take place in a society where nobody who has the ability to influence events knows these things; where people do not know how to create their own analysis of events, to argue well, or to invent new social structures that benefit communities; to be active agents in negotiating their society's political destiny, keeping in mind the invented conceptual "guardrails" that maintain things like rule through law, and equal rights. In a society like that, elitism is all you have! Where the thought-inventions of our modern civilization are maintained, there is more possibility for creating an egalitarian society, in certain contexts, more power-sharing, and I think the evidence suggests more social progress.

This doesn't get enough credit these days, but I think the historical evidence suggests certain forms of religion have helped promote some of these civilizational inventions as virtues, on a widespread basis, supporting the secular education that spread them.

My experience has been that the reason people may put the label "elitist" on it is that learning these ideas is hard, and everybody knows that. So, there's been an understood implication that only a small number of people will be able to know most of them, and if most of the attention is devoted to inculcating these inventions in a relatively small number of people, then that will create an elite who will use their skills to the disadvantage of everyone else, who did not receive this education. What these people prefer to use instead is a lowest-common-denominator notion of egalitarianism, which doesn't promote egalitarian virtues in the long run, because it attenuates the possibility of maintaining a society where people can enact them. If we forget the hard stuff, because it's hard, we won't get the benefits they offer, over time. We will revert to a pre-modern state, because all the power to maintain our civilization is in these ideas. Keeping them as conventions/traditions is not good enough, because as we see, conventions get challenged via. a pragmatic, anti-tradition impulse with each new generation.

“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” H.L. Mencken, 1919

This is very much in the spirit of the thinking that led to the American Constitution, and Tom Paine's "Instead of having the King be the Law, we can have the Law be the King".

We need solutions that allow further thinking and design to be done.

One way to look at this is to ask questions about "human nature" and to what extent does it need to be followed and to what extent should we try to teach (even train) the children to act in "designed ways" -- for example, not trying to take revenge.

The interesting and difficult parts of goals like these are that we have humans in the mix while trying to come up with better societal designs. For example, even the best forms of socialism have been "gamed" incessantly, and often fatally, by humans only interested in "harvesting" for themselves.

This is one of many reasons why well thought out versions of social reform have often been destroyed when the implementation phase is started "Every one loves Change, except for the Change part!"

"Well, a saying I made up at PARC was, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” They’ve got simple things being simple and they have complex things being impossible, so that’s wrong."

All 3?

Actually, both scripting and the commandline are effective ways of making you organize your program into nouns and verbs that can be extended by the user.

But I don’t think rearranging the basic UI is that useful, because all your users are basically the same - we’re all human and not Lisp programmers.

The unfortunate associations of wanting society to "execute better" (i.e. the merger of industry and the state found under fascism) just underline the fact that applying performance measurements to human life/social phenomena is misguided. We don't all agree on the purpose of life or the nature of happiness, nor should we.

Has the number of people who want to learn decreased? If so, was it because of iPhones/iPads?

This.

Why is it so hard for developers to understand this simple idea?

Life in computing would be so much easier if the people building the system understood what part of their job is essential (finding out the best way to arrange hardware and software to satisfy a requirement) and which part is circumstancial, gathering a set of precise requirements to begin with.

The last part wouldn't be needed if end users were able to build their own working prototypes to solve their needs, and engineers were simply called to rebuild the prototype with best engineering practices.

Functions and Functors/Monads can be used to express the most elegant abstraction over data that I am aware of.

In Haskell, you can write a program that uses maps/folds/etc, your program is suddenly able to use any kind of Monad-derived data type.

Everything is discrete, since everything that isn't purely functional is wrapped in a Monad.

I agree with the rest of what you said but those are just design decisions. My point was that, regardless of the code headaches, the platform itself (HTML, CSS, JS) is an incredibly flexible and resilient system.

I agree. I see the conflict between designers and users to be one of the primary reasons for the current state of the web.

The conflict is about who gets to control how the content looks. The web was intended for users to have that control. The browser is your "user agent", you get to decide what and how gets fetched and displayed. The designers, on the other hand, want to treat webpages as color magazines - they want to have full control over what's shown on your screen, as for them the form is just as important as the actual content. They would happily serve you the web page as a PDF, if they could get away with it.

Personally, I'm firmly in the "user gets to control" camp, but the market prefers the "designers get to control" camp. So here we are, with web browsers continuously removing the ability to control anything, and the HTML/CSS accruing more and more layout control tools.

That difference means that it's orders of magnitude easier to "abuse" Excel to do some things it wasn't designed to do than to do the same with HTML. I seriously wonder if the reliance on HTML to this day is not a kind of "job security" thing for web devs (like myself, btw)...

I find that most arguments that I have had with people usually end with them implying that their epistemology is rooted in something that is "good" or "reasonable" or "close enough" without any explanation of why it is that their chosen way of looking at the world must necessarily be beneficial. Indeed, you have pointed out that maths is a source of "important and valuable things", which I could agree with, but only with the understanding that our agreement is bound to the reality defined by our joint observations, and not a universal truth.

My point was not about choosing axioms, but about incompleteness, undefinability, uncomputability, etc., which cut short any attempts to bless a particular set of axioms as uniquely correct. You are only seeing the surface level so far; I assure you that it all deconstructs. (Be careful when looking directly at The Void.)

Finally: Where does meaning come from when having dialogues? Hofstadter explains it well: We constantly exchange deeply-coded messages with recursive layers of meaning, trying to reflect the symbols in our mind into words which we think will reconstruct those symbols in the minds we talk to. The "mooring of their meaning" is a fascinating illusion based on the inherent difficulty of stepping outside ourselves to examine where our own sense of meaning comes from.

Deconstruction changed the way we think about what we read, see, and hear, and taught us to question the assumptions inherent in the same. It gave us the spaghetti western, cyberpunk, and arguably punk rock itself (and it definitely influenced hip hop and dub).

Always remember that postmodernism is "defense against the dark arts" for the left. The techniques of playing shell games with symbol and meaning were devised by the right and by corporations and weaponized against us; postmodernism exists to make us aware of these techniques.

But I didn't really bring up the Derrida fan to argue about deconstruction or postmodernist thought.

Yes they could, but I really think this is subjective. In my case I prefer NOT to have a spot because of aesthetic reasons, plus I never use the stylus.

But like I said, this is subjective. And that's exactly the point. You can't really judge execution based on subjective qualities like this. It's impossible to satisfy everyone.

It's just a difference in vision. People have different priorities. For example the Bitcoin community right now is divided into two based on their philosophy, and you can't say one is right and one is wrong because each has their own vision and each side makes sense in their own right.

I'm sure Alan Kay had his own vision about what a computer could become. I think if he's so dissatisfied with what it's come to, the best approach is to build one himself and give it to the world. (But honestly, as someone who's been thinking a lot about this field, I see so many "plot holes" in all the criticism he's making)

I am all for visionaries building inspiring products and shipping to market. But it's sad to see people like him dwelling on the past instead of the future.

2. Which means you're making assumptions about what I'm thinking.

3. Please don't label others on the Internet with words like "Neoliberal", etc. We are all same people and there may be misunderstanding but we are not fundamentally different species.

4. My point was not to say these not-for-profit research is useless, but that if you're in this field, you should own it. If people build things that are mediocre and you know a better way, why not build one and show it for yourself? He hasn't done that because he doesn't know either. And by "Knowing" I mean actually knowing to build a product that people will use without any problem. It is easy to criticize implementation, it's not easy to actually do it yourself. With all due respect, prototyping and actually turning it into a product that general public can use are completely different ball games.

It's also worth noting that TCP/IP was able to outfox the planned X.25 ISO standard for international network transport in large part because ARPA was releasing code and standards for free and testing it live. All of that happened before the Internet was commercialized.