>It's a horrible programming model, though.

Have you ever actually programmed in this model? I wrote a correct RAFT library in ~300 lines of code that are extremely legible using this model.

> It's a horrible programming model, though. We should be glad this is not how most languages work.

This is not only about languages, but also environments. The argument Kay makes is that in order to make very large complex systems that are resilient, you need something like this kind of message passing. And indeed, this is how the Internet works too

The Internet works in hundreds of different ways, message passing, RPC, REST, store and forward, propagation, etc...

It's all made possible because of the protocol which is a kind of message passing. If a node somewhere on the Internet doesn't receive a packet for whatever reason, the whole network doesn't come crashing down.