[gunnihinn]

> Bret Victor is very much Alan Kay's protege and has unfortunately inherited the curse of people cherry-picking particular ideas and missing the bigger picture.

Maybe it's time we lay some of the blame for us idiots just not getting Alan Kay's ideas on Alan Kay. At this point he only has himself to blame if he's spent 50 years trying and failing to communicate his wonderful ideas.

[pavlov]

Honest question: who in this field has a better track record of their visionary ideas leading to real-world implementations than Alan Kay?

Not everything ended up being adopted in the form he envisioned or with the semantics he proposed, but there have been a lot of right calls and influential designs in his 50+ year career.

[davidy123]

Douglas Engelbart. Tim Berners-Lee. Smalltalk is pretty cool, though.

[pas]

I think his experiment with DSLs (VPRI STEPS project) is very insightful, I always herpderp about how we need better tools to in situ express "the domain", but of course reality has a very strong bias for keeping apparent complexity down, keeping cognitive friction between components minimal, leaky abstractions are bad so encapsulation has to be total, so it's extra hard as an afterthought (hence ORMs and middlewares tend to be very clunky), etc.

Though there are a few examples of moving in the right (?) direction, for example styled components (for React, which moves CSS into JS/TS code, there's a VScode plugin for it, and thanks to the tagged templates they can be validated).

[m_mueller]

I remember seeing a demo where A.K. used an experimental OS made with ~1k LOC using STEPS approach to actually run his slides. Never found the link to it again (if someone has it I'd appreciate), but even more importantly, I'd love to know what happened with that OS. It would seem like a great research OS going forward if it really had GUI, networking and FS expressed with such low amount of user code. It also seems to me the project coming closest to Engelbart's vision (as their NLS also did everything just by meta-programming to an assembler with increasingly high levels of abstraction).

[Ygg2]

Alan Kay is the Tesla of programming. Beautiful design, genius implementation but utterly impractical in 90% cases.

[1123581321]

He hasn't failed at all. What are you talking about? Dozens of programming languages are more sensible and ergonomic because of his influence.