I have always found interesting how some people seem to make an effort to justify to themselves - in all sorts of ways - their failure to grasp something.
Alan Kay is a supreme genius, there can be no question about that, but also an original and deep thinker who is not afraid of not falling inline with the prevailing ideology of the day. He is deeply rooted in the outside, the sphere of human thought and potential that iconoclastic transformative ideas spring from. And, here you come, unfavorably comparing him to Bret Victor rather than seeking to fill the gaps within you that do not let you appreciate what the genius is plainly talking about. In a way you are testament to the point Alan Kay is making. Your inability to grasp simple - yet unpopular and certainly not easy - ideas and your preference for easily-digestible material demonstrates the degree of cultural erosion in play today.
In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored, languages like JavaScript and PHP proliferate whilst the best ideas behind Smalltalk and Lisp are still not widely used because the armies of 9-5 for-money “coders” are not in a position to appreciate them, in such a world you have people reaching for Bret Victor and describing an Alan Kay talk as boring. Sad state of affairs.
In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored
Well, to be fair, Alan is a Turing Award recipient since 2003. He's hardly ostracized and if he's ignored, it's because his cause is ignored.
He speaks of a broken present leading to a wider broken future. And to conceive that things are broken requires a deep understanding of the fundamentals of what you're looking at. Is you car currently horribly inefficient? You probably (like me) would have no idea. It would require knowing what every part does and what was it designed to do and why. That's a big ask. It requires a deeply fundamental understanding of it all.
And this -- this -- is what he's talking about in the lecture. He's gone from proselytizing the brokenness to preaching how to build the new mindset that can recognize it, which is the first and best shot at addressing it.
Alan Kay is a supreme genius, there can be no question about that, but also an original and deep thinker who is not afraid of not falling inline with the prevailing ideology of the day. He is deeply rooted in the outside, the sphere of human thought and potential that iconoclastic transformative ideas spring from. And, here you come, unfavorably comparing him to Bret Victor rather than seeking to fill the gaps within you that do not let you appreciate what the genius is plainly talking about. In a way you are testament to the point Alan Kay is making. Your inability to grasp simple - yet unpopular and certainly not easy - ideas and your preference for easily-digestible material demonstrates the degree of cultural erosion in play today.
In a world where people like Tim Berners Lee are given the Turing award and people like Alan Kay are ostracized and ignored, languages like JavaScript and PHP proliferate whilst the best ideas behind Smalltalk and Lisp are still not widely used because the armies of 9-5 for-money “coders” are not in a position to appreciate them, in such a world you have people reaching for Bret Victor and describing an Alan Kay talk as boring. Sad state of affairs.