Dear Alan,
Dear List,

the following very recent announcement might be of interest to this discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/browse_thread/thread/7668a9d46a43e482

To quote Andreas et al.:

     "Mozilla believes that the web can displace proprietary,
   single-vendor stacks for application development.  To make open web
   technologies a better basis for future applications on mobile and
   desktop alike, we need to keep pushing the envelope of the web to
   include --- and in places exceed --- the capabilities of the
   competing stacks in question. "

Though there is not much there yet (just a kind of manifesto and a readme file on github) https://github.com/andreasgal/B2G, I think this is a encouragning development, as the web becomes more and more a walled garden of giants, I think we desperately need to have open APIs. Strong open client APIs hopefully bring more power to individuals. What do you think?

Cheers,
-- Jakob



Am 24.07.2011 19:24, schrieb Alan Kay:
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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