If Alan Kay doesn't respond directly to this comment, what is Hacker News even for? :)
You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can only point to programmers having a general lack of knowledge about their incredibly short history.
(In reality my hope is some slice of devs have achieved this and I've summoned links to their projects by claiming the opposite on the internet.)
Edit: just so I get the right incantation for summoning links-- I'm talking about the whole enchilada of a visual language that runs and rebuilds the user's flowchart program as the user modelessly edits it.
My gut is your main complaint is largely the modern web ecosystem? Games can run circles around that application, as obvious inspiration. But high end architectural tools are probably more of what you have in mind.
The easy example I used to use to really blow people's minds on what was possible was Mathematica.
That is to say, it isn't so much lack of knowledge of history. It is lack of knowledge of the present. And a seeming unwillingness to want to pay for some things from a lot of folks.
> E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025
Why? What problem did it solve that we're suffering from in 2025?
You're not wrong about history, but that only strengthens Kay's case. E.g., our gazillion-times better physical substrate should have led an array of hotshot devs to write web apps that run circles around GraIL[1] by 2025. (Note the modeless GUI interaction.) Well, guess what? Such a thing definitely doesn't exist. And that can only point to programmers having a general lack of knowledge about their incredibly short history.
(In reality my hope is some slice of devs have achieved this and I've summoned links to their projects by claiming the opposite on the internet.)
Edit: just so I get the right incantation for summoning links-- I'm talking about the whole enchilada of a visual language that runs and rebuilds the user's flowchart program as the user modelessly edits it.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQhVQ1UG6aM