This is an old article, and I'm tired of seeing Alan Kay talk about the past. That said, it's true. I'm also baffled that we have no collective memory as an industry. The rush for the almighty Euro has left us reinventing the wheel, the axle, fire... We keep writing the same code over and over, often in different contexts, and jumping up and down at the novelty. It's so funny to hear people rave about Gmail when I was using better mail clients in 1992. Honestly. We have no sense of history and we have lost our way.
back
2 comments
It's so funny to hear people rave about Gmail when I was using better mail clients in 1992.
So you must still be using better email clients. Gmail is the best I've come accross; I love tags compared to folders. Please, what is better?
Gmail is the best web client. My favorite email client is actually a newsreader: Forte Inc's Agent, a second best is Eudora. Thunderbird is what I use now, it's OK.
It doesn't go down easily the modern OSs we use are either a GUI-based desktop OS that wouldn't be serious and compete with OS/2 with a billion patches applied or some rehash of 70's Unix.
Really... Why is that Smalltalk/80 and Lisp'56 still make Java'2009 seem primitive?
Even the Smalltalk/80 environment makes Windows'2009 look primitive (colorful, translucent and primitive).
It's interesting you should say that because I've often considered Smalltalk/80 as the last point we were headed in the right direction.
I've spent a long time (a decade, yikes) with some Ph.D students doing research on the trajectory I think it should have taken.
I just finished reading an og copy of the smalltalk/80 language manual/specification and seriously - how did things go so backward? I bought the book to get a better feel for what sort of object hierarchy to use in my pet language and found far more than that. I wasn't planning on caring about the graphical side of things but even that was insanely cool!