Alan Kay Decries the State of Computing

gnaremooz writes "Computer pioneer Alan Kay (DARPA in the '60s, PARC in the '70s, now HP Labs) declares 'The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about.' He believes that PCs should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short."

Comments

Croquet

[lukeduff]

In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines."

He's probably talking about Croquet which is a 3d collaborative environment developed on top of Squeak. Impressive stuff.

Re:Arrgh..

[RevAaron]

I'm not talking about Smalltalk. I'm talking about Squeak. RTA.

I've no acronym for this, but Know What You're Talking About (KWYTA?). Squeak *is* Smalltalk. It's not the only Smalltalk dialect there is, but it the fastest growing Smalltalk, the Smalltalk with the biggest online community around it.

If you run a LOGO implementation, written in C, on top of your Linux/X11 box, you don't say that "C is nothing but LOGO," or "Man, leenux suxors, all you can do is play with LOGO" do you? You can use Squeak in a number of ways. You can use the eToys scripting system, which is what I assume you are thinking of as modernized LOGO. Or, if for some reason you feel more "adult" doing so, you can write the GUI in all of your apps in a purely programmatic way. Or, you could do what most Squeakers do- just get the job done in the way that makes sense.