

Alan Kay: The Power Of The Context [pdf] - mbrubeck
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf

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david927
This is an old article, and I'm tired of seeing Alan Kay talk about the past.
That said, it's true. I'm also baffled that we have no collective memory as an
industry. The rush for the almighty Euro has left us reinventing the wheel,
the axle, fire... We keep writing the same code over and over, often in
different contexts, and jumping up and down at the novelty. It's so funny to
hear people rave about Gmail when I was using better mail clients in 1992.
Honestly. We have no sense of history and we have lost our way.

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rbanffy
It doesn't go down easily the modern OSs we use are either a GUI-based desktop
OS that wouldn't be serious and compete with OS/2 with a billion patches
applied or some rehash of 70's Unix.

Really... Why is that Smalltalk/80 and Lisp'56 still make Java'2009 seem
primitive?

Even the Smalltalk/80 environment makes Windows'2009 look primitive (colorful,
translucent and primitive).

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david927
It's interesting you should say that because I've often considered
Smalltalk/80 as the last point we were headed in the right direction.

I've spent a long time (a decade, yikes) with some Ph.D students doing
research on the trajectory I think it should have taken.

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probablycorey
Is there anyway we can purge scribd from the internet? Can we pay them to take
the site down?

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biohacker42
I think they are a YC company so I think we'll be seeing more of them.

But I've mentioned here before that I would PAY for a website which would do
the oposite of scribd, turn Docs and PDFs and Flash and what not into plain
HTML. Fast, no plugins required - awesome.

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mmphosis
[http://google.com/search?q=cache:SdlYNbOXScIJ:www.vpri.org/p...](http://google.com/search?q=cache:SdlYNbOXScIJ:www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf+http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk)

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biohacker42
Yes, that's still better then PDFs, but it's not exactly great. That's why I
think there's room for a company that does it well.

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swolchok
Shouldn't that be [pdf] in the title, with a second [scribd version] link? If
nothing else, it would've gotten me to visit the link sooner that way -- I
hate scribd.

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mbrubeck
Good idea. Updated the link title.

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andreyf
The rest of the VPRI writings is also great:

<http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php>

