I wish them luck. In my humble opinion, they're making many mistakes. Their core principles aren't abstract enough. "Golden Box" is a technology not a principle -- and it isn't necessary to get where they want to go. As long as they focus on "small and self-describing", they won't go anywhere. Lisp is beautiful in this way, but that's irrelevant. I heard they even pinned-up some code that Ian wrote. Bad move -- no Golden Calves. You have to be able to throw it all out every few months. There are some other things I could say but won't. I respect Alan Kay more than anyone in this industry. So, again, good luck.
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Is there any idea more closely identified with Alan Kay than "small and self-describing"?
I would more identify that with John McCarthy, but I know what you mean. The problem is that it's making him bark up the wrong tree.
Heh. A grammatical glitch. What I meant was, Is there any idea Alan Kay is more closely identified with than "small and self-describing"?
More importantly, I'd like to hear why you think it's the wrong tree. The point of a small and self-describing design is that it provides extensibility and (logical) scalability that other approaches can't match (or even dream of). Why would that have been a good idea in the Smalltalk days but a bad idea now?
I know it makes perfect sense but it's just not going to get them where they want to go. It's not fair to say that and not back it up, but it would take too long to explain. Suffice it to say that 'small' is right, but not in terms of code, and 'self-describing' doesn't even play a role.