Hi Marcel
I think I've already said a bit about the Web on this list -- mostly about the
complete misunderstanding of the situation the web and browser designers had.
All the systems principles needed for a good design were already extant, but I
don't think they were known to the designers, even though many of them were
embedded in the actual computers and operating systems they used.
The simplest way to see what I'm talking about is to notice the many-many
things
that could be done on a personal computer/workstation that couldn't be done in
the web & browser running on the very same personal computer/workstation. There
was never any good reason for these differences.
Another way to look at this is from the point of view of "separation of
concerns". A big question in any system is "how much does 'Part A' have to know
about 'Part B' (and vice versa) in order to make things happen?" The web and
browser designs fail on this really badly, and have forced set after set of
weak
conventions into larger and larger, but still weak browsers and, worse, onto
zillions of web pages on the net.
Basically, one of the main parts of good systems design is to try to find ways
to finesse safe actions without having to know much. So -- for example --
Squeak
runs everywhere because it can carry all of its own resources with it, and the
OS processes/address-spaces allow it to run safely, but do not have to know
anything about Squeak to run it. Similarly Squeak does not have to know much to
run on every machine - just how to get events, a display buffer, and to map its
file conventions onto the local ones. On a bare machine, Squeak *is* the OS,
etc. So much for old ideas from the 70s!
The main idea here is that a windowing 2.5 D UI can compose views from many
sources into a "page". The sources can be opaque because they can even do their
own rendering if needed. Since the sources can run in protected address-spaces
their actions can be confined, and "we" the mini-OS running all this do not
have
to know anything about them. This is how apps work on personal computers, and
there is no reason why things shouldn't work this way when the address-spaces
come from other parts of the net. There would then be no difference between
"local" and "global" apps.
Since parts of the address spaces can be externalized, indexing as rich (and
richer) to what we have now still can be done.
And so forth.
The Native Client part of Chrome finally allows what should have been done in
the first place (we are now about 20+ years after the first web proposals by
Berners-Lee). However, this approach will need to be adopted by most of the
already existing multiple browsers before it can really be used in a practical
way in the world of personal computing -- and there are signs that there is not
a lot of agreement or understanding why this would be a good thing.
The sad and odd thing is that so many people in the computer field were so
lacking in "systems consciousness" that they couldn't see this, and failed to
complain mightily as the web was being set up and a really painful genii was
being let out of the bottle.
As Kurt Vonnegut used to say "And so it goes".
Cheers,
Alan
________________________________
From: Marcel Weiher <marcel.wei...@gmail.com>
To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org>
Cc: Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com>
Sent: Sun, July 24, 2011 5:39:26 AM
Subject: Re: [fonc] Alan Kay talk at HPI in Potsdam
Hi Alan,
as usual, it was inspiring talking to your colleagues and hearing you speak at
Potsdam. I think I finally got the Model-T image, which resonated with my
fondness for Objective-C: a language that a 17 year old with no experience
with
compilers or runtimes can implement and that manages to boil down dynamic
OO/messaging to a single special function can't be all bad :-)
There was one question I had on the scaling issue that would not have fitted in
the Q&A: while praising the design of the Internet, you spoke less well of
the
World Wide Web, which surprised me a bit. Can you elaborate?
Thanks,
Marcel
On Jul 22, 2011, at 6:29 , Alan Kay wrote:
To All,
>
>This wound up being a talk to several hundred students, so most of the content
>is about "ways to think about things", with just a little about scaling and
>STEPS at the end.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Alan
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