For example, Google and other search engines would not work without the principle of least power [1], which a lot of people, including Alan Kay [2], somehow don't understand. That is, if the web language was a VM rather than HTML, there would be no Google.
It would also not have been possible for the web to make the jump from desktops to cell phones as the #1 client now. You know the handler in iOS and Android that makes <select> boxes usable? That's an example of the principle of least power.
I recommend reading his book "Weaving the Web" [2] if you want to learn more about the story behind the web.
I'm very glad that TBL is getting this recognition. He is a genius and also has a very generous personality.
People in the programming community seem to talk about Torvalds or Stallman a lot, perhaps because of their loud styles, but I don't see that much about TBL.
Ditto in the CS community. "HyperText" used to be a big research area but I guess TBL solved it and people don't talk about it anymore.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_least_power
[2] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit...
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-Web-Original-Ultimate-Destiny...
Kay's criticism of the Web is very well justified and (like most of his high-level criticisms) typically misunderstood. He doesn't criticize it as a repository of hyperlinked documents. He criticizes it as platform for application delivery, which it became. Modern web with all its scripts is a VM -- and badly designed one at that.
The hypertext repository was so compelling that everyone installed software to access it. Then that universally available software was so compelling that people found ways to run increasingly complex applications on it. And that's how we naturally found ourselves where we are today.
I don't see any reason to think that engineering a more perfect solution all at once would have worked better than this natural progression.
He thinks that you can just design something nice from whole cloth and people will use it. That's why his designs aren't deployed.
I've been looking at projects like OOVM and going back in history to Self and SmallTalk, and there's a reason that those things aren't deployed. Don't get me wrong -- they're certainly influential and valuable.
But he's basically confusing research and engineering, as if engineering wasn't even a thing, and you can just come up with stuff and have people use it because it's good. You need a balance of both to "change the world", and TBL has certainly done that.
Another analogy I use is complaining about the human body. Like "who designed this thing there there trachea and esophagus are so close together?!? What an idiot!!!" Or "why are all these people mentally ill and otherwise non-functional members of society? Who designed this crap?"
The point is that it couldn't have been any different. It wasn't designed; it was evolved.
Okay, so what's wrong with discussing the limitations of the human body and the ways to improve it then?
Yes, the web evolved instead of being designed (however much that distinction makes sense), but arrived at a shi^H^H^H suboptimal result. And it arrived there through deliberate design decisions of people - who unfortunately were designing a different system in the first place.
It's like English. I love English, but it's a bloody mess that we're all stuck with now - except that changing a computer system is comparatively easy to changing the direction of a language.
Because that's exactly what they did in Xerox Park, many times over.
>That's why his designs aren't deployed.
No comment.
>But he's basically confusing research and engineering, as if engineering wasn't even a thing, and you can just come up with stuff and have people use it because it's good.
Kay has many talks about the difference between invention and innovation (which are much better terms than ones you're using). In fact, his analysis of this difference is probably the most insightful and though-provoking technology talk I have ever seen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o
Of course, this subject makes a lot of developers highly uncomfortable, hence a lot of shallow, ignorant, knee-jerk dismissals. "Everything is incremental." "Everything is the only way it could be." "This is fine." And so on. Thing is, Kay worked at Xerox and Apple. He read a myriad of books and research papers on computing, which he constantly references in his talks and writings. He worked and continues to work with some of the most forward-thinking people in the field of computing. In late eighties he foresaw most of the current computing trends - which is verifiable via YouTube. Even without any context his talks display a considerable depth of thought. In short: unlike some people, he actually knows what he is talking about.
>The point is that it couldn't have been any different. It wasn't designed; it was evolved.
And that is why someone who designed it just received a Turing award. Makes perfect sense.
Edit: Regarding your other comment here.
>If the web is a genius for hypertext, but not for app delivery, then he should have just said so. That is not a very hard sentiment to express. "The Web was done by Amateurs" doesn't capture it.
He has several decades worth of talks and writing. If you haven't bothered to familiarize yourself with at least some of them to understand what he means it's your own fault.
If the web is a genius for hypertext, but not for app delivery, then he should have just said so. That is not a very hard sentiment to express. "The Web was done by Amateurs" doesn't capture it.
But I don't even think that's true. If the web were really bad as an application delivery platform, someone should have supplanted it by now. Alan Kay or someone else should go design their own awesome VM for application delivery. I guarantee you it will fail, for reasons of fundamental to its design, while TBL's platform succeeded for reasons fundamental to its design.
Leaving out those things wasn't an accident or ignorance as Alan Kay claims. There were a lot of very conscious design decisions involved in the web -- again see "Weaving the Web".
He may regret that the web has evolved into walled gardens, but what could he have possibly have done about it? There's to prevent that decades in advance, at least not without strangling it from birth.
But, your argument is perilously close to begging the question that the success of web is a good thing. Now, I happen to think that the web is a net good (no pun intended), because (among other things) it helped break Microsoft’s hegemony and continues to force OS vendors to provide and support a standard universal computing platform (albeit a crippled one). But, it’s also arguable that the success of the web may have set personal computing back by a few decades, while also exacerbating a bunch of other problems like wealth inequality and reduced privacy/sovereignty, because it turned the Internet into a big modem.
I’ll take a look at Weaving the Web; thank you for the recommendation. To you, I commend Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future.
he rails against the walled gardens while at the same time putting things into the standard, like EME, they powers them.
The W3C has to negotiate with industry. But, unfortunately for us that care about the open web, its position is weak.
-- Alan Kay
That quote is pretty unfortunate. I guess nobody's perfect.
1. http://worrydream.com/TheWebOfAlexandria/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot
3. Comment elsewhere in this thread about how we have been forced into turning a document system into a VM.
[0] https://www.ps.uni-saarland.de/Publications/documents/devien...
I think the problem would be that the computation would get cut off at different points on every machine, leading to an unstable ecosystem. Remember the browser has to run on devices with at least an order of magnitude difference in resources, probably 2 orders now.
Generally, you want to guarantee that your style computations terminate. Now it appears that CSS doesn't actually provide that guarantee, since it's Turing complete :) But I guess it's close enough in practice.
Thanks for the recommendation. Let me check it out. Let me search for it. WWW is very important to my life.
Stallman did Emacs in whose invention AFAIK he did take part, and then he took part in implementing some other innovative projects, though I don't really know his CS career (I mostly know him as the face of GNU and FSF).
IDK but having created a popular project should not be equal to a big innovation in the field.
So you seriously think that "new" is better, then "well done"?
I don't think it makes sense to compare those 2 things and value one higher than the other. Of what use are innovations, if you can't use them in a "popular project"?
No. But Linux is not more well-made than, say, the kernel of any modern BSD, or that of illumos, etc. Git is not technically superior to Mercurial et al. Torvalds' success is certainly a big, admirable one, but it's a different kind of success than that of Berners-Lee.
Also, while it's the most popular kernel, it's not like we'd not have anything we do have today if it didn't exist, it's in essence an ordinary kernel that came out in the right time. It's those who made the distros and reverse-engineered the drivers and ported/packaged thousands of programs who made Linux a big thing.
WWW, on the other hand, is an invention. It's something that did not exist, and it transformed the world like nothing else.
That was my point ;) Otherwise we agree ...
Claude Shannon never won it.
On the other hand, I think I use Claude's work in the same sense that I use Kirchhoff's laws everyday.
More than a significant fraction of Turing awards have been won by theoreticians.
Go with the Turing Award if you want to be remembered.
> Forbes magazine updates a complete global list of known U.S. dollar billionaires every year. John D. Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed U.S. dollar billionaire in 1916
If you want to play, note that I did not say USD anywhere in my comment. Not to mention that Forbes was founded in 1917, and so it clearly has no data collected to "confirm" an earlier billionaire. We can go back to the 14th century if you like (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Musa_I_of_Mali):
> During his reign Mali may have been the largest producer of gold in the world at a point of exceptional demand. One of the richest people in history, he is known to have been enormously wealthy; reported as being inconceivably rich by contemporaries, "There’s really no way to put an accurate number on his wealth" (Davidson 2015).
But thanks, I actually never knew that about USD billionaires.
Anyways, it was just an example.
(But I guess developing them into a useful product is itself an invention. Maybe there's no bright line between discovery and invention.)
EDITED: 20th century, not 19th.