Here is Alan Kay from a talk that was just on HN today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY&t=8m9s
The amount of complication can be hundreds of times more than the
complexity, maybe thousands of times more. This is why appealing to
personal computing is, I think, a good ploy in a talk like this because
surely we don't think there's 120 million lines of code—of *content* in
Microsoft's Windows — surely not — or in Microsoft Office. It's just
incomprehensible.
And just speaking from the perspective of Xerox Parc where we had to do this
the first time with a much smaller group — and, it's true there's more stuff
today — but back then, we were able to do the operating system, the
programming language, the application, and the user interface in about ten
thousand lines of code.
Now, it's true that we were able to build our own computers. That makes a
huge difference, because we didn't have to do the kind of optimization that
people do today because we've got things back-asswards today. We let Intel
make processors that may or may not be good for anything, and then the
programmer's job is to make Intel look good by making code that will
actually somehow run on it. And if you think about that, it couldn't be
stupider. It's completely backwards. What you really want to do is to
define your software system *first* — define it in the way that makes it the
most runnable, most comprehensible — and then you want be able to build
whatever hardware is needed, and build it in a timely fashion to run that
software.
And of course that's possible today with FPGA's; it was possible in the 70's
at Xerox Parc with microcode. The problem in between is, when we were doing
this stuff at Parc, we went to Intel and Motorola and pleading with them to
put forms of microcode into the chips to allow customization and function
for the different kinds of languages that were going to have to run on the
chips, and they said, What do you mean? What are you talking about?
Because it never occurred to them. It still hasn't.