Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful

Similar claim was made by Alan Kay in his lecture Normal Considered Harmful [1]. However he didn't complain about lower barriers to entry. Instead he pointed out that the people in the 90s ignored the work and experience of the past generations of programmers. He especially criticized the Web. [1] this video

Interestingly, this was what Alan Kay was advocating for on the web: "A bytecode VM og something like X for graphics" [1]. When Lars Bak and Kasper Lund launched Dart [2], I found it sad that they weren't more bold - left CSS and the DOM alone, and created an alternative Content-Type. So you can choose to Accept 'application/magic-bytecode' [3] before text/html, if your client supports so. Sadly, we ended up with Web Assembly, which by the few talks I've seen, appears to only cater to that of graphic/game developers, with no support for dynamic or OO languages. [1] this video [2] link [3] Or in Dart lingo, a VM snapshot.

This is obviously entirely false if one takes "genius" to mean someone who does things a non-genius would not be able to do. There have been attempts in recent years to roll back and debase the definition of genius to be more compatible with egalitarianism (especially in parts of Europe) and the tenet of homogeneity but this is not what genius originally stood for. Fabian Tasano writes: "Regarding the version of “genius” that is currently in retreat but still occasionally used: many people seem to have a simplistic idea of what it takes to be one. According to one popular model, all that is required is an increase in the magnitude of certain qualities which everyone already possesses in some measure. Make the particular qualities pronounced enough, and you get to genius. But a better way to understand the concept — assuming we’re applying the word to (say) Gauss or Picasso, rather than John Cleese or Wayne Rooney — may be that a genius has a particular capacity, which on a certain level can seem obvious or unremarkable, but which no one else has. A genius, on this understanding, is a person uniquely capable of making a leap ‘off the path’. With hindsight the leap may seem simple or obvious, but at the time no one else was, apparently, capable of making it. A potential leap of this kind is made possible by preceding leaps. Nevertheless its actual occurrence may go on not happening for decades. During that time there may be clear pointers towards it. Yet it is not until a geniu

Of course not. I am in undergrad. But I think Alan Kay has been "exposed" to computer science, and I follow his logic, based on my limited scope of knowledge. this video

You're all over the place here and your arguments make no sense whatsoever when examined. First, you conflate mass-appeal with some sort of objective "better" criterion which is of course bonkers. To use one of your own examples against you, there are hundreds of thousands of Java monkeys out there that are using glue other people made to tie together rocks to build stonewalls. Which do fail as soon as the weather stops being nice. Security (you should look into Java deserialization bugs), reliability, performance what do they know about any of these things? Second, you conflate late-binding as present in Lisp and Smalltalk with late-binding present in other dynamic languages. The two are not equivalent, a perfect example of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Lisp and Smalltalk will never become popular (read my previous comment), but that does not mean that they do not sit on an apex and still have a lot to give. To anyone interested in the "craft of programming", "the Art", there is nothing better period. Here are some references for you, from the masters themselves: [1] link [2] link [3] this video

> as in other fields Well maybe it isn't a field after all. Maybe it's "pop culture" like this cranky old guy says this video .

I love the function call timing story: > The iAPX 432 failure could best be summed up by a meeting of Intel marketroids and Tandem engineers who wanted to use the chip in their next generation machine, after the slides, the senior engineer asked: “How long does it take to execute a procedure call?” > The presenter looked it up. “Two hundred and fifty microseconds.” > Tom immediately walked out, followed by the majority of the Tandem software department. The presenter was poleaxed. “What did I say?” Found in comments to this video , but I saw it somewhere else, too, I just don't recall where. Doesn't anyone know?

I hope the time spent was worth learning something new :). I think having new languages have access to the dom can have huge benefits to end users but as you said, the initial indicators aren't looking good. It seems that there isn't a general consensus on how the web should be handled as a target platform. There is a talk from Alan Kay[1] where he says the web should've been like an operating system kernel from the start (if you want the juicy part it is at 23:45). The fact that both the inital users of this tech, after unlocking these new abilities, opted to use it to increase performance for canvas, instead of trying to create real web experiences leads me to think that those developers share his viewpoint. [1] this video

"A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" - Alan Kay He said that in a video "nornal considered harmful" that you can find on Youtube[1]. He talks about it at 34:29 [1] this video