

Alan Kay: "An oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?" - michael_dorfman
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.beginners/6311

======
mechanical_fish
_Is the world completely reverting to an oral culture of assertions held
around an electronic campfire?_

No. Not "reverting". This is how culture has always been. It's just that, now
that the campfire is electronic, it's easier to perceive the truth about how
culture works. It's a lot more like Twitter than like an academic journal's
letters page.

Kay's right that the web makes it easier than ever to interject cited facts
into everyday conversation, and that _is_ having an effect on the discourse.
But he's got the arrow of time pointing the wrong way. Once, people were even
_more_ ignorant of the real answers to questions like "what's the history of
Smalltalk"? They just didn't advertise that ignorance in a worldwide
publishing medium.

~~~
bkovitz
Thank you for pointing this out. Lately I'd been feeling despondent, thinking
that the Internet is mostly a sea of unsupported opinion. The surfeit of
opinion seems driven by the fact that (a) unsupported opinion is easier to
write and publish than carefully researched facts and analysis, and (b)
opinion is also easier and more titillating to read. But really, things are
improving.

Another great morale-lifter was _Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the
Madness of Crowds_. When you read how common and insane were the myths and
fads of previous times, you think how lucky you are to be alive now, when the
irrationality quotient is so much lower.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_you think how lucky you are to be alive now, when the irrationality quotient
is so much lower._

I can't tell if you're being serious or if this is the most deliciously ironic
riposte that I have ever had the pleasure to read. Either way, I'm grateful.

Yes, thank goodness for our increased rationality since the days of
_Extraordinary Popular Delusions_. If not for all the rational thinkers we
have today, we might have had to endure one or even _two_ completely
irrational economic bubbles in the last decade alone. Man, wouldn't that have
sucked?

Anyway, I agree that the irrationality quotient is lower, but I wouldn't go so
far as to claim that it's _much_ lower. ;)

------
bayareaguy
Sadly Mr. Kay's culture comment distracts from the best part of his response
where he writes:

 _These seven influences got me to thinking about one abstraction that was
indeed like a biological cell on the one hand and an entire computer on the
other which could be universally used at all levels of scales in both software
and hardware to "model anything" (including all the old inconvenient things
computing was using)._

That's perhaps the most enlightening statement about the history of Smalltalk
I've ever seen.

------
akkartik
I enjoyed this response:
[http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.be...](http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.smalltalk.squeak.beginners/6315)

The formatting was so hard to read, though, that I had to put it into my
editor and start performing surgery as I read.

<http://akkartik.name/blog/2009-08-02-17-29-19-soc>

------
pj
_...that can provide substantiations with just a little curiosity and work?_

I think the answer is: People don't want to work. People are lazy. The very
field of computer science was developed to help people do less work and still
accomplish more.

The internet does this as well.

There's a scene in Waking Life that asks what the most essential human
characteristic is: Fear or Laziness.

I think it's Laziness.

~~~
Confusion
The most essential characteristic of life is the drive to replicate. That's
the only reason why it still exists and will keep existing. Everything else is
secondary to that.

------
olavk
The context seem to be a lisper who want to assert that Smalltalk has grown
from Lisp, which seem to be only partially true.

Secondly there seem to be a slight misunderstanding - Smalltalk was influenced
by biological concept according to Kay, while the poster he replies just
denies that Smalltalk has its origin i biology - I would assume he meant used
for research by biologist, which to me is something rather different than
inspired by biological metaphors.

So basically different perspectives and misunderstandings escalate into a
total unnecessary flamewar. What else is new.

~~~
abecedarius
I can see the context appearing that way, but I wouldn't call Richard O'Keefe
a Lisper -- he's the author of The Craft of Prolog.

