A classic piece which contains one of the best things ever written about design:<p><i>Take the hardest and most profound thing you need to do, make it great, and then build every easier thing out of it.</i><p>It's interesting to me that the idea that inspired Kay to this insight was FEXPRs: letting functions control the evaluation of their arguments. FEXPRs have long been banished from the Lisp world, which makes a sharp distinction between functions and macros (only the latter get to control evaluation). I still don't quite understand the reasons for this, and it seems like Kay doesn't either -- or at least didn't when he was inventing Smalltalk.
This is really odd, I'm having a bug on chrome windows where the html gets printed out as plaintext. MIME type issues on the server side maybe? Other than that, looks like an interesting read.
Really good read, abeit a bit long. It has a lot more details about the Xerox Parc days then the movies like "Triumph of the nerds had". It was interesting to hear a deeper understanding of the actor model in Smalltalk and simula