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.
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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.