(2004-07-15) Leung Kay Croquet

Ted Leung on Croquet Collaboration Ware, based on Squeak Smalltalk. So what did I find depressing? During the QA session, Alan Kay took stock of the state of computing today: "When they set out to build Croquet, they intended to do it in Java, but they felt that they had to abandon it because it lacked (and still does) the meta facilities that they needed. Instead they chose to use Squeak. They had to go back to 1970's technology. Kay regards this as a disaster. All languages, Smalltalk included, are bad for this day and age. We essentially haven't learned anything since 1975 when the last interesting feature was added to Smalltalk... OpenGL is the best thinking about 3D circa 1972 at the University of Utah. At least it doesn't get in the way too much...Lisp is the number one programming language idea of all time. Smalltalk's contribution was to build encapsulation on top of the ideas in Lisp." Much as I love Lisp, it seems to me that the Smalltalk community, led by folks like Kay, are continuing to demonstrate a convincing agenda for forward progress, while the Lisp community is perennially struggling with basic infrastructure issues like which dialect of Lisp/Scheme, which windowing environment, etc. Perhaps this is due to the conception of Smalltalk as a system, in addition to a language.