The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet OOPSLA 97 Keynote (VPRI 0719)

"this has to be one of the worst ideas since MS-DOS.." If you can spare three and a half minutes (start time set to the relevant point) to watch the video 1from 1997 below... link to this video ...then you might enjoy the different point of view as discussed here: link It comes up on HN from time to time, but I thought an alternative source of discussion (second link above) might add something new. 1 if you have never watched this talk completely at least once, give it a shot and you might be very surprised.

>I can only say, we still live in a dark age wrt programming. It feels like we're stuck in an outdated paradigm, unable to advance the science/artform much further. Instead we keep reinventing the flat wheel, to paraphrase Alan Kay. Reading about all the innovation that took place in the 60s and 70s really opened my eyes. Realizing how little has happened since made me disillusioned. Sure, there have been some wonderful languages (Haskell, Clojure, Rust) and incremental innovations on top of the old, but we're still operating within a larger paradigm that goes back to WWII, and it's holding us back. I mean, these aren't even new realizations: * John Backus' Can Programming Be Liberated f…

…he got it so wrong, the Internet changes everything". Hah. Alan Kay's "the computer revolution has not happened yet" is more relevant today than ever 1. It's up to us to change that. 0I think JWZ (Jaimie Zawinski) spoke about that in "Coders at work", can't find the exact source. 1PDF: link There's also a youtube video of his presentation link to this video…

…icult problem (in general) though -- probably the best example of this is the poor (and in some circles, pretty vile) criticism that Google Wave received, though this type of feedback is probably due in part to a lack of understanding of the problem being solved. "The content revolution hasn't happened yet!" 1 :-) 1 with apologies to Alan Kay, link to this video…

> Kay was probably riffing off of that. You don't need to hypothesize about all this, to put things in their proper context you could listen to the speech where he famously said it. link to this video