Re:Alan Kay and OO Programming
by potta_coffee on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @10:55AM
(#19970693)
You sound like a really fun guy to hang out with. Also, a lot of those "clowns" are building things that make a lot of money and serve a lot of customers.
"Software Engineering must be the only engineering discipline where mastery of tools and barrier to entry in terms of skills are in many ways inversely correlated with market demands. Every clown can write software these days and in fact a lot of clowns get paid six figure salaries to do so. When the domain is largely composed of clowns, standards become extinct and one finds oneself calibrating for a circus."
This is very important when we think about certain ideas expressed by geniuses that are so far ahead of their time that even smart people don't understand them. Unfortunately this seems to have happened to Alan Kay and his ideas. Maybe in 50 or 100 years, the modern software engineering race-to-the-bottom culture will have evolved enough (or more realistically, either exhausted dead-end paradigms or slammed into one unfathomable disaster or another) to appreciate them.