Preventing the future
A ZDNet blog gives a report on a series of lectures by Alan Kay.
Kay’s first talk was on some of the ways we’re “inventing and preventing the future.” Kay, who received the ACM’s Turing Award in 2003, invented, or participated in the invention, of many of the technologies we take for granted in the digital age including the personal computer, object-oriented programming, overlapping windows, the mouse, and even Ethernet. Frankly Kay sees that as a problem. Much of what is wrong about Computer Science is that many of the ideas that happened before 1975 are still the current paradigm. He has a strong feeling that our field has been mired for some time,
Another interesting comment illustrates part of the reason Microsoft has a vested interest in the past
He pointed out that Windows XP has 70 million lines of code. It’s impossible for Kay to believe that it has 70 million lines of content. Microsoft engineers don’t dare prune it because they don’t know what it all does.
Most or maybe even all of the major companies involved in PCs have a vested interest in the past because their investment in the existing structure and methods of doing things is huge. It takes a company with a lot of visionary leadership to ditch old methods and hunt for new ones. That is why it is usually new companies that give us the new ideas. It was the upstart Netscape that recognized the potential of the Internet. After Microsoft crushed them, browser development was stifled until Firefox came along. Similarly, it was a new company, Google, that refined the Internet in many ways by making searching so painless and efficient.
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