A stupid newbie question

Alan Kay Alan.Kay at squeakland.org
Tue Oct 9 04:13:21 UTC 2001


Ken --

I love your analogies!

But, my counter analogy would be to notice that most of the world 
still has little feeling for equal rights and democracy. They still 
use "tried and true" methods of governance like monarchies and 
fascism. However difficult, I still would prefer to go across the 
ocean to try to create a much better way of living. This can be done. 
It is more work, requires more learning on the part of the 
inhabitants, but it's a better,  more esthetic, and more satisfying 
life.

Cheers,

Alan

At 7:46 PM -0700 10/8/01, Ken Kahn wrote:
>From: Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org>
>
>>P.S. Arguments that something bad but long established (such as MS
>>Windows conventions) should be catered to don't have a lot of force
>>for me.
>
>I agree there is no strong need to cater to Windows UI conventions. But the
>bigger issue is to whether to build upon an existing environment or build
>one from scratch. Let me try a biological analogy. Squeak seems to be about
>finding a newly emergent island and populating it with plants and animals.
>The alternative is to find old islands that already have a rich ecology and
>strive to coexist. It is true that the old islands (like MS Windows) may
>have many warts (rats, mosquitos, posionous spiders, etc.) but they also
>have plants you can eat, animals you can domesticate, trees for shelter etc.
>Making the new islands habitable is a much larger task. The resulting island
>may have a nice rationale design while colonizing old islands is a more
>chaotic distributed process that lacks the elegance of a top-down design.
>But maybe it is a richer, more adaptive environment.
>
>To push this analogy further, back when Smalltalk was being designed most
>islands were bare or nearly so. Today over 90% of the "islands" out there
>are running MS Windows. Sure, islands can be sterilized and recolonized but
>the point is that there already is an existing ecology one can join and
>build upon.
>
>I'm not arguing that Squeak will fail only that it is trying to do something
>very hard and risky. I hope it succeeds.
>
>Best,
>
>-ken kahn ( www.toontalk.com )


-- 




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