There is a interview with Adele Goldberg in which she points out how she and a few others went off from parc to build a company and to create something what today is known as open source

I found it quite interesting: Interview with Adele goldberg

here is my zettelkasten note for the interview:

• worked with Alan Kay at PARC • interview on PARC industry, american relationship between academic research, industrial sponsered research and , • starting business into corporate buisiness sponsored by ven. cap. • developement of open source as a social developement

Another thing you mentioned I see similarly critical, which is how alan kays work failed to have an impace in the broader culture of industry, education etc.. Of course its a complex Issue But lets take the STEPS project as an example: Here is the HN discussion thread about that report: Interview with Adele goldberg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11686325 I commented there with the user "notusinglinux" , I basically argue that to little effort was made to make the source of the project available, even if they didn't believe people would understand it. And IF they thought people would not understand it, why not create some kind of educational effort where to explore these ideas with a larger community? A MOOC or something related?

I tracked this quite a bit for example, a substantial part of the STEPS project was the graphics subsystem: NILE and GEZIRA. Dame Lang was the key collaborator here, he actually did publish some stuff on github and you can see how people were REALLY interested in that stuff. This is the relevant discussion ( you will find me there too): https://github.com/damelang/nile/issues/3

people really tried to convince him that he should be working on this and explain it more to people, eventually Dan said : he would need about 6000$ a Month as compensation. And somehow this was the end of the discussion there. He never made a patreon account or opencollective or something other ( as far as I know).

Which leads us to the Funding problem and why I'm still interested in the Blockchain/web3 space, for example recently I came through the PKM topic to two open source Projects: athens research and logseq. Both are also struggling with funding, but at least have patreon and opencollective accounts. To move beyond this kind "we donate some money to our favorite OS project" another approach, even a different culture is needed. Experiments like these give me hope : https://radicle.xyz/blog/radicle-orgs.html

In lex fridmans recent interview with Jaron Lanier, Lanier mentions a combination of Tik tok and github. Spontaneous yet deep and valuable collaboration.

I would even posit that Lua is the proper successor to BASIC … in its beginner friendliness, usage in games and Fortran heritage.

HyperCard was also a interesting approach as people moved away from the potential concepts suggested from xerox parc the technology (computer software and hardware became driven by a kind of monopolistic industry culture). HyperCard was a apple idea/product but look how much creativity/agency/sovereignty apple tools give you today

One of the interesting concepts out of that STEPs/ VPRI context was that of virtual time. It actually made it into a JS lib: https://twitter.com/codefrau/status/1430715818115883008?s=20

As for Basic, that's what I started computing with myself. Its single selling point was that it ran on machines people could actually afford. For me as a high-school student in 1982, it was Basic or nothing. Easy choice 🙂 With hindsight, Basic didn't really matter. For enthusiasts, anything is OK to get you started. It's a different matter for people who need a gentle push to get interested in coding. If many of today's programmers got started with Basic, that's probably survival bias to a large degree.