Alan Kay on the Computer Revolution
I got this in email as a response to this post:
Last night I read a piece by Dr. Alan Kay. Within the article is a section "Most of current practice today was invented in the 60s". It goes on:"It is worth noting the slow pace of assimilation and acceptance in the larger world. C++ was made by doing to C roughly what was done to Algol in 1965 to make Simula. Java is very similar. The mouse and hyper-linking were invented in the early sixties. HTML is a markup language like SCRIBE of the late 60s. XML is a more generalized notation, but just does notationally what LISP did in the 60s. Linux is basically Unix, which dates from 1970, yet is now the "hottest thing" for many programmers. Overlapping window UIs are one of the few ideas from the seventies that has been adopted today. But most of the systems ideas that programmers use today are from the data- and server-centric world of the 60s.
The lag of adoption seems to be about 30 years for the larger world of programming, especially in business."
This, as you might expect, leads us to believe that the time for Smalltalk (and Lisp?) is about to come?
Comments
The time for Smalltalk
[Dave Astels] April 2, 2003 17:24:07.063
That is encouraging. It certainly looks/feels like dynamic languages are poised to become very popular. Couple that with the growing awareness of and appreciation for a more agile approach, and some very exciting things could be on the horizon. How do we foster that? How do we make sure Smalltalk is poised to take advantage of it? Dave
The time for Smalltalk
[Alex Peake] April 3, 2003 11:27:15.210
IMHO, the available Smalltalks need to be more complete - enough "out-of-the-box" to solve entire problems *well* in some significant domain (Commerce/Business applications in my case), and books on the shelf that describe (step-by-step) how to execute solutions in that domain.