In fact, let’s not even worry about Java. Let’s not complain about Microsoft. Let’s not worry about them because we know how to program computers, too, and in fact we know how to do it in a meta-way. We can set up an alternative point of view, and we’re not the only ones who do this, as you’re well aware.

The death of Smalltalk in a way came as soon as it got recognized by real programmers as being something useful; they made it into more of their own image, and it started losing its nice end-user features.

I came up with a facetious sunspot theory, just noting that there’s a major language or two every 101⁄2 years, and in between those periods are what you might call hybrid languages.

I grew up with macro systems in the early ’60s, and you have to do a lot of work to make them work for you—otherwise, they kill you.

The adoption of programming languages has very often been somewhat accidental, and the emphasis has very often been on how easy it is to implement the programming language rather than on its actual merits and features. For instance, Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

In one anecdote, Kay relates showing a custom system (built in Smalltalk) meant to facilitate non-expert “programming,” to executives from Xerox PARC. This system was a kind of highly advanced programming language meant to make human-machine interaction at a very high level intuitive for non-expert users. At one point during a demonstration, a vice president, after an hour of working with the system, realized he was programming. What they accomplished, then, was a keystone for a software system which Kay felt bridged the gap between the numbers coursing through a CPU somewhere, and human intuitive reasoning.

Once you have something that grows faster than education grows, you’re always going to get a pop culture.

A lot of the problems that computing has had in the last 25 years comes from systems where the designers were trying to fix some short-term thing and didn’t think about whether the idea would scale if it were adopted.

Corporate buyers often buy in terms of feature sets. But at PARC our idea was, since you never step in the same river twice, the number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment.

One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.

You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to capture people as they were.

If you look at software today, through the lens of the history of engineering, it’s certainly engineering of a sort—but it’s the kind of engineering that people without the concept of the arch did. Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

One way of looking at languages [is] in this way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features or they’re a crystallization of style. Languages such as APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style languages, where there’s a real center and imputed style to how you’re supposed to do everything.

I think the style languages appeal to people who have a certain mathematical laziness to them. Laziness actually pays off later on, because if you wind up spending a little extra time seeing that “oh, yes, this language is going to allow me to do this really, really nicely, and in a more general way than I could do it over here,” usually that comes back to help you when you’ve had a new idea a year down the road. The agglutinative languages, on the other hand, tend to produce agglutinations and they are very, very difficult to untangle when you’ve had that new idea.

An integral part of the Xerox PARC Philosophy was to dismantle the wall between software developers and computer users, to develop systems so easy to program that doing so would be a natural, simple aspect of computer use.

Perhaps seeking a way of turning the HyperCard phenomenon into a revenue stream, Apple eventually transferred HyperCard development to a subsidiary company, which attempted to transform it into a profitable business model. HyperCard was no longer released for free, but a locked down version, capable of playing, but not developing, HyperCard Applications was freely available. The “developer’s edition,” recognizable as just HyperCard, was available for purchase. In an effort to make HyperCard into a business model, Apple inadvertently had separated users into “developers” and “users.” This, combined with the development of work-alike with more features, seemed to destroy HyperCard’s momentum, and, despite later attempts at revival at Apple, the system fell out of use.

While the Dynabook was meant to be a device deeply rooted in the ethos of active education and human enhancement, the iDevices are essentially glorified entertainment and social interaction (and tracking) devices, and Apple controlled revenue stream generators for developers. The entire “App Store” model, then works to divide the world into developers and software users, whereas the Xerox PARC philosophy was for there to be a continuum between these two states.

Even modern extensible software like Firefox tends to separate use from extension development - the average user might have no idea that Firefox supports user extension. In HyperCard, these features were “on the surface” of the design.

[Before the first nuclear test at Los Alamos] a man asked me to check some arithmetic he had done, […] When I asked what it was, he said, “It is the probability that the test bomb will ignite the whole atmosphere.” […] The next day when he came for the answers I remarked to him, “The arithmetic was apparently correct but I do not know about the formulas for the capture cross sections for oxygen and nitrogen-after all, there could be no experiments at the needed energy levels.” He replied, like a physicist talking to a mathematician, that he wanted me to check the arithmetic not the physics, and left. I said to myself, “What have you done, Hamming, you are involved in risking all of life that is known in the Universe, and you do not know much of an essential part?” I was pacing up and down the corridor when a friend asked me what was bothering me. I told him. His reply was, “Never mind, Hamming, no one will ever blame you.”

In a world where centralized technology like Google can literally give you a good guess at any piece of human knowledge in milliseconds, its a real tragedy that the immense power of cheap, freely available computational systems remains locked behind opaque interfaces, obscure programming languages, and expensive licensing agreements.

HyperCard was, by comparison, much closer to the Dynabook ethos. In a sense, the iPad is the failed “HyperCard Player” brought to corporate fruition

HyperCard also illustrates some of the difficulties that might be responsible for the gradual shift away from Xerox PARC-like open models of personal computing. According to rumor, the developer of HyperCard, Bill Atkinson, allegedly gave the product to Apple in 1987, with the understanding that it would be distributed for free with each Mac. The program was an immediate success. HyperCard produced a tremendous amount of feedback from the community, but since it was a free product, Apple wasn’t sure how much internal resources should be devoted to handling HyperCard development.

Smalltalk was created with the education of adolescents in mind - the iPad thinks of this group as a market segment.