On a tangent to the previous thread, I'm concerned that there is a semantic change happening for the phrase "tool for thought." "Tool for thought" and "augmentation of human intelligence" has a rather vase meaning, obviously. Programming environments can be tools for thought, so can design tools, writing tools and more [0]. But I worry that most people who are starting to get introduced to the term, only see a narrow manifestation of it in the form of Personal Knowledge Management systems. This could further obfuscate the wonderful but nebulous "tool for thought" idea, and make it even less accessible than it already is. This feels similar to the semantic change of the term "Object Oriented Programming" that was initially about message passing, but since most people's introduction to it was through C++/Java, it lost its original meaning and became about objects, making the original idea behind OOP even more obscure.

Although Alan Kay doesn't admit this, I think OOP stopped being about message-passing when they changed Smalltalk from asynchronous to synchronous. This happened between Smalltalk '74 and '76 I believe.

I agree with you, I think the best way that I avoided that narrowness was by seeing talks and reading about the bigger picture examples. Not current apps, but alphabets, algebra, calculus, geometry, etc. There was a talk posted recently, Legacy of Computing that compellingly covered some historical examples, and Bret Victor, Alan Kay and others have covered many examples too. I’d love to put together a collection of these examples as a way to more properly introduce people to the idea.

@Nick Smith do you have any links on asynchronous Smalltalk? Sounds tantalizing.

@Kartik Agaram I don’t have any resources handy (not sure if any code was publicly released) but with a bit of google-fu you can verify that Smalltalk used to work that way

@Kartik Agaram Erlang models that original async message passing pretty much to the original definition if you're curious about the original idea of OOP.