Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet

You should check out Alan Kay's OOPSLA keynote "The Compute Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet" at [VIDEO] specifically about 20 mintues in where he says that a browser should be exactly what you say here. On the one hand, he was talking about this almost 20 years ago, on the other hand you're in good company because he's a pretty smart guy! I encourage all developers to watch that talk and do some thinking about the current state of our practice and where we want to go from here.

Most Alan Kay's presentations I've seen were worth watching. Tons of great ideas in each. They really improved how I reason about systems. There is this famous talk from OOPSLA 1997: [VIDEO] If you want to see what "practical" OOP looked like in the 80s, this is a good video: [LINK]

I recently (re)discovered Alan Kay's 1997 OOPSLA talk: [VIDEO] For others that have been following his work (and talks), it doesn't really contain much new stuff, but the context of a talk to an audience of programmers brings out some different contexts. He touches on the the fact that they didn't "just" spend extra money to prototype the dynabook in the form of the Alto - but they built 2000 machines - and part of that is of course so they could invite (among others) whole classes of school children to come and play with the tech.

No, compared to the early vision (1950s/60s) of computers as metatools that humans can use to augment their cognition. The current crop of mobile devices (and even most desktop devices) are nowhere nearer to that glorious goal. See his OOPSLA talk "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet" - [VIDEO]

operating systems which are totally transparent and easily understood by their users I sort of glossed over this part so now I have a chance to elaborate. Alan Kay has put a ton of thought into this issue [1]. He firmly believes that we can build an operating system and application software with an extremely small footprint (LOC's) so that a single person can understand the whole thing. Since he gave that talk, we've moved further and further away from Kay's vision. We've made things more and more complex, opaque, centralized, and difficult to change. We've given away our future to big tech companies. Heck, we've even given away the past. We've lost much of the freedom we had back in the 90's, let alone the 70's and 80's when Kay did so much of his work. We're going to have to work incredibly hard just to regain what we've lost. [1] [VIDEO]

The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet , OOPSLA 1997 keynote [VIDEO] Others have already mentioned The Early History of Smalltalk , highly recommended. You'll probably want to read it a couple of times, revisit from time to time. The big idea is messaging, or rather "ma" [LINK] "The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be." "I think I recall also pointing out that it is vitally important not just to have a complete metasystem, but to have fences that help guard the crossing of metaboundaries." " I would say that a system that allowed other metathings to be done in the ordinary course of programming (like changing what inheritance means, or what is an instance) is a bad design. (I believe that systems should allow these things, but the design should be such that there are clear fences that have to be crossed when serious extensions are made.)" "I would suggest that more progress could be made if the smart and talented Squeak list would think more about what the next step in metaprogramming should be -- how can we get great power, parsimony, AND security of meaning?"

I should just probably say, clearly you haven't seen Common Lisp's defpackage, modules are actually first class objects there and are completely decoupled from the file system. But most importantly as Barbara Liskov mentions in this video[1] we don't know what is a module exactly or how to use them yet. Which is an specific statement aligned with Alan Kay's famous "We don't know how to design systems so let's not turn it into a religion yet."[2] tl;dr; 1) Innovation is good. 2) Javascript's module is a half assed implementation of Common Lisp's defpackage. (Don't get me wrong is still way better than Python's abhorrent ninja goto: import) [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]

The Alan Kay reference is from his OOPSLA'97 talk [2], where he says that he's "apologized profusely over the last 20 years for introducing the term 'object oriented'" and suggests that the Japanese notion of "Ma" or "the unseen stuff that goes between objects" as what is important. (edit) [3] is a quote from a communication with Kay in 2003 - "OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them." [2] [VIDEO] (around 38minutes) [3] [LINK]