Alan Kay: "An oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?"
article.gmane.org
article.gmane.org
No. Not "reverting". This is how culture has always been. It's just that, now that the campfire is electronic, it's easier to perceive the truth about how culture works. It's a lot more like Twitter than like an academic journal's letters page.
Kay's right that the web makes it easier than ever to interject cited facts into everyday conversation, and that is having an effect on the discourse. But he's got the arrow of time pointing the wrong way. Once, people were even more ignorant of the real answers to questions like "what's the history of Smalltalk"? They just didn't advertise that ignorance in a worldwide publishing medium.
It seems to me that this can be viewed as a "culture" of a sort, tied to the notion of writing and publication, where there an implied responsibility to some basic notions-- Derrida, in an interview, for example, says "it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy."
Another great morale-lifter was Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. When you read how common and insane were the myths and fads of previous times, you think how lucky you are to be alive now, when the irrationality quotient is so much lower.
I can't tell if you're being serious or if this is the most deliciously ironic riposte that I have ever had the pleasure to read. Either way, I'm grateful.
Yes, thank goodness for our increased rationality since the days of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. If not for all the rational thinkers we have today, we might have had to endure one or even two completely irrational economic bubbles in the last decade alone. Man, wouldn't that have sucked?
Anyway, I agree that the irrationality quotient is lower, but I wouldn't go so far as to claim that it's much lower. ;)
These seven influences got me to thinking about one abstraction that was indeed like a biological cell on the one hand and an entire computer on the other which could be universally used at all levels of scales in both software and hardware to "model anything" (including all the old inconvenient things computing was using).
That's perhaps the most enlightening statement about the history of Smalltalk I've ever seen.
The formatting was so hard to read, though, that I had to put it into my editor and start performing surgery as I read.
I think the answer is: People don't want to work. People are lazy. The very field of computer science was developed to help people do less work and still accomplish more.
The internet does this as well.
There's a scene in Waking Life that asks what the most essential human characteristic is: Fear or Laziness.
I think it's Laziness.
Secondly there seem to be a slight misunderstanding - Smalltalk was influenced by biological concept according to Kay, while the poster he replies just denies that Smalltalk has its origin i biology - I would assume he meant used for research by biologist, which to me is something rather different than inspired by biological metaphors.
So basically different perspectives and misunderstandings escalate into a total unnecessary flamewar. What else is new.