Hello, I'm Yoshiki Ohshima, working with Alan for a few years. I happened to be the only person who enjoyed the full show of Alan's keynote *in person*, so I guess I can clarify a few questions^^;
Guido wrote: > Well, for a start I'd like to see what Alan Kay used in his keynote. > I'm guessing that's Logowiki. What Alan used in the talk was a slight variation of Squeakland Squeak. Virtually all code he used in the demo was available in the Squeak image downloadable at http://squeakland.org. Most of the content, including graphics, paintings, and "scripts" written in the tile-script are not there (only in Alan's image), but some eToys examples are available at the site, too. The dynamic interaction, full control of the graphics rendering, object manipulation with decent performance you saw in the demo is way beyond what today's JavaScript in a browser could deal with. The demo ain't Logowiki. The remote collaboration tool Alan used is called "Nebraska"; a low-tech screen sharing system in Squeak. Squeak running on a computer at CERN was sending the encoded drawing command to another computer in LA, and the user-events by Alan was again encoded and sent to the computer at CERN. (Nebraska is in the Squeakland image, too.) BTW, we are working on an eToys-like environment that is capable of server-based content authoring (asynchronous collaboration like wiki) as well as real-time collaboration based on a "better theory of collaboration". In regards to the "is the web good?" discussion. Sure, the web is good, but it could have been much better. For an historical account, the idea of "objects that talk to each other bi-directionally over the network" weren't new by the time HTTP was created. In fact, when the word "hypertext" was invented, Ted Nelson surely wanted the things on the net connected bi-directionally. (And ACM Hypertext conference predates HTTP, etc., etc.) Today's JavaScript in a browser is not exactly a great way of doing stuff, but the fast computers now let us do reasonably interesting stuff. However, if we would have started with a "language for the Web", which were as dynamic as JavaScript, and its execution engine properly incoporated known implementation techniques by the time, we would have been a few steps further. (HotJava in JavaScript on a well written execution engine?) Of course, hindsight is 20/20. I couldn't have done it if I were there, but to think of a possible better and fun world that we might have missed, I feel that learning from the history helps a lot. And, it gives good insights on the directions from "here". -- Yoshiki Microsoft Windows helped to create this world where reasonably cheap computers are abundant, and "everybody" gets the access to the net. But there could be a better world, right? _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
