Alan Kay on "Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?"
donhopkins.medium.com14 points by signa11 14 hours ago
14 points by signa11 14 hours ago
Kay’s answer to the browser/document subject is pretty solid.
This is a stupid conversation though, as if hoping everything is either just plain text with hyperlinks or mandating everything into PDF. Nobody wants that except a couple of lonely nerds in the corner who hate JavaScript.
> Nobody wants that except a couple of lonely nerds in the corner who hate JavaScript.
Hey, anyone else want to join us in this corner?
In 1997, the Justice Department decided that Operating Systems and Web Browsers must remain separate. Since then, the Web Browser has been becoming an Operating System.
IMHO, for effective computing in the Internet era, we should not be depending on classical OS or application centric but data-centric. Otherwise it will be always a mismatched of abstraction between OS and application. In this case a web OS inside a classical OS, remember webOS anyone [1]?
This should a new data-centric OS similar to TabulaROSA in concept where data is managed and governed by mathematical relationship in this case associative array based D4M [2],[3].
This concept can be implemented initially on Linux, since now Linux support generic non-conventional kernel bypass for memory, storage and compute with io_uring and eBPF, for examples [4].
[1] webOS:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebOS
[2] TabulaROSA: Tabular Operating System Architecture for Massively Parallel Heterogeneous Compute Engines:
https://dspace.mit.edu/entities/publication/69c8906b-440f-49...
[3] D4M:
[4] BPF comes to io_uring at last:
Imagine how rich Apple could have become if they had used Alan Kay's brilliance to build hyper engaging products and services instead of letting him toil away uselessly trying to make the bicycle of the mind. What a waste.
Snark aside, Apple did built Alan Kay's vision. Just 50 years too late, and in a half-arsed way.