Alan Kay on Smalltalk Origins

Alan Kay responds in a discussion about the origins of the Smalltalk programming language:

This is an interesting example of an ever increasing web disease — that is: expressing mere opinions without foundations or checking. This one is easy, because there is a readily available “Early History of Smalltalk” that the ACM got me to write in 1993. So why wouldn’t people just type “history of smalltalk” into Google? (I don’t know and I haven’t been able to figure this out).

The very first hit finds this paper. (This one is not the best version of it because someone just scanned the doc I wrote to get an HTML version and left out lots of the pictures. But in looking at it, it seems to answer this question very straightforwardly — and that answer was given by “someone who was actually there” and had a hand in the invention of Smalltalk, rather than people with opinions from the side.)

What is wrong? Why is mere opinion so dominating discussions held on the easiest medium there has ever been that can provide substantiations with just a little curiosity and work? Is the world completely reverting to an oral culture of assertions held around an electronic campfire?

I’m not sure that our behaviour on the Internet is much different to what you get at the water-cooler, in the tea-room or on talk-back radio. But instant access to the facts makes it less excusable.

Anyway, if you’re a software developer, Alan Kay’s paper is a good read.