Alan Kay made an excellent point. In order not to dilute it, I quote him verbatim.
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."-- Alan Kay.
Tim Berners Lee was trained to be a physicist. He wasn't aware of the things computer scientists had learned in the last few decades. He was a clever man who came up with a clever idea, but it wasn't engineered to scale.
I think Kay is right, and more ambitious tech firms are definitely running up against this wall. The fact that Google wrote a new Javascript engine tells me that Kay's proposal, where the web should have been like an operating system on which you could run programs in a separate address space and with limited access to underlying system calls - is coming to pass, except in this OS the assembly is Javascript.
Comments
Alan Kay made an excellent point. In order not to dilute it, I quote him verbatim.
"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."-- Alan Kay.
Tim Berners Lee was trained to be a physicist. He wasn't aware of the things computer scientists had learned in the last few decades. He was a clever man who came up with a clever idea, but it wasn't engineered to scale.
I think Kay is right, and more ambitious tech firms are definitely running up against this wall. The fact that Google wrote a new Javascript engine tells me that Kay's proposal, where the web should have been like an operating system on which you could run programs in a separate address space and with limited access to underlying system calls - is coming to pass, except in this OS the assembly is Javascript.
The www is fine. TBL shouldn't be blamed for the horrible mess that it turned into as people kludged it to do things stupidly and inelegantly.
Yenc binaries on Usenet are stupid an inelegant yet petabytes of stuff have been shifted around on Usenet servers.
Humans are creative and capable of trashing almost any RFC no matter how well written it was.