Why would you a hypothetical quote of Kay for cutting off the full context that he also has criticisms of Smalltalk, and then cut yourself before he specifies that what he's not committed to is the syntax and library system, while the message-passing execution model is the important thing he's trying to promote? That just muddies the waters more. This email was sent a year after OOPSLA 97, so clearly he can't have been talking about messaging as Smalltalk's problem.
As for where he wants Smalltalk to go, that's what Squeak was for. He talked about it on plenty of occasions, at least one of which was also before OOPSLA, and actually did get a research team together to develop it out in the late 2000s: https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Papers_from_Viewpoints_Re...
The original Smalltalk in 1972, the language of which Kay designed, indeed had some kind of message passing (even though it was synchronous, the receiving object interpreted messages composed of tokens). Smalltalk-76, essentially designed by Ingalls, who was also the sole author of the 1978 publication, made a fundamental shift towards compiled virtual methods, essentially as it was done in Simula 67 and adopted by C++ (though much less efficient). So yes, it makes pretty much sense when Kay claims that he didn't have C++ nor Smalltalk in mind when talking about OO. See also https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3386335.
It's because the IBM PC was released in 1981, and over the next several years, as prices came down, steadily overran pretty much every other competing platform and took all the variety out of the market from a historical perspective. If you're interested in 40-year-old computers you could have a collection with a z80 machine, a 68k, a 6502, a tms9918a, or an 8088, and that's just variety in CPU architecture, and just some of the popular ones. Everything else was the wild west, too. Go backward too many years from there, though and the home and small business computer manufacturing industry just isn't as big, and specimens become an order of magnitude harder to find that aren't just glorified calculators. You have to put up a lot of cash comparatively to get the fun part of the hobby of owning and using them yourself over just reading about them, which you can do for any machine in any era, plus they're harder to service. If you're collecting 20 years later, though, things had gotten so much more standardized and developed that it feels almost like a different hobby. Most all of what you'll buy will be some variant of the HP versus Emachines dichotony: either an expensive IBM PC Compatible using all the common standards, with a high-tier x86 that mostly does what they all do but faster, and maybe an add-in specialty card, or a cheap IBM PC Compatible with some of the common standards, some things shaved off for cost, a low-tier x86 processor that's just more frustrating than your fast one, and a motherboard covered in cheap components that you have to solder in replacements for before it even works again.
I've painted a bit of a skewed picture here, but not by much. You can still collect later computers, and people do, but it's understandable that most people are drawn to the "cambrian explosion" of the whole line of history, no? Variety is the spice of life, and plenty its staple food to be spiced.
Plus, if you are looking to teach a child interested in programming specifically, you might consider Snap/Build Your Own Blocks [0], an extension of Scratch made partially by an instructor of SICP at Berkeley to support things like anonymous functions, prototypes, and metaprogramming. It seems robust enough a child given it now could get right up to undergraduate introductory CS as the genuine article! I would have been amazed if any of the systems to enable kids to make games of my childhood (which I did get a pretty unrepresentatively bad batch of besides) had that kind of potential to them. Imagine a high schooler today reading, say, a blog post about their favorite game's scripting system for its quest designers and implementing its high level beat for beat themselves. Sure it'll run disappointingly slow but the education potential is immense.
By analogy, programmers like LISP over other syntax for the same reason that creative children like LEGO over other toys. It's not that the pieces in the box are more beautiful than any other individual example of molded plastic, but because they are purpose-built to be the maximizing mold such that a box full of them gives more flexibility and potential than a box of any other shape you might choose. Lisp syntax is the way it is to create a human-machine interface with as much similarity between the two sides as possible, so the human approaches machine power when you write code, and the machine approaches human reasonability when you inspect running code.
For examples, McCarthy's original purpose was to demonstrate the effectiveness of a symbolic differentiation process he had dreamt up, so he devised the syntax and meta-circular evaluator of lisp to make it maximally obvious from the program text that the differentiation system was mathematically correct, while keeping it maximally obvious from the program model definition that it was computationally concrete. In response to new trends in the programming field, Lispers write mind-bending books like "Let over Lambda", "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol", or "Software Design for Flexibility" to show that, when your syntax and model is right, you can radically change how you solve problems not by rewriting your spec or switching languages but by just adding more lisp to the lisp you already have, which has the same simplicity as radically increasing the sculptures a child can make by just adding more lego to the lego they already have.
Lisps, on the other hand, tend to add features as just more convenient versions of things they can already do: Macrology for self-adapting code? Just lisp functions on lisp data structures corresponding to lisp functions. Actors for a concurrent execution model? Lisp functions as lisp data parameterized by higher-order lisp functions. Composable continuations for error handling? A lisp function exploring a lisp data structure of lisp data structures of lisp functions. It's turtles all the way down. Paul Graham points out that you can understand the social hype the presence or absence of a feature like operator overloading as a consequence of friction-ful syntaxes, while lispers care much less because replacing a function you don't prefer with one you do for your use case is straightforward in a friction-free syntax. When he decided to build a reddit clone for tech entrepreneurs he didn't need an outside data system just to get started, he only had to spin up a pool of threads for sessions to directly modify s-expression literals in memory, which he could save or modify by printing straight to disk and load by just reading the lisp syntax back into memory like all lisp code is, with no execution intermediary like languages such as the Pythons tend to have complicating things enough to make comparatively big services like a whole database for a private gossip forum worth the effort. The syntax doesn't make lisp first-order beautiful, it makes lisp the hacker's local maximum, which is second-order beautiful, and honestly isn't much harder to get into the habit of reading once you know it's worth it.
Your comment was in response to an argument about what the law is. This entire thread is about a court case, which deal with what the law is. You're in no position to accuse others of not responding on-topic.
His comment, despite being placed as a reply to mine, did not address what I was arguing.
I'm particular the "clearly no" does not work. The "clear" thing was not what I was contesting.
And I want to state here that I don't want to relitigate anything in the original discussion. I'm only replying because you seem to misunderstand what this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41607486 meant in the first place and I'm willing to explain in other wording what it meant.
Do you want to explain that in any way, or do you just want to be rude while you keep saying incorrect things about my comments? In particular, I never accused anyone of being off-topic.
Early in this conversation I made a comment that shifted the topic slightly, but was also a reply to the argument in the parent comment. tptacek's reply to me was not a reply to the argument in my comment. It was arguing past me. Or I could say it was strawmanning me, but that makes it sound too intentional.
I think that situation is pretty simple. It also seems pretty simple that you misunderstood my comment #41607486.
What's your actual criticism, other than the incorrect idea that I accused tptacek of being off-topic, and other than vague petty snipes?
So I'm not missing anything. You had exactly one criticism, and I explained over and over that it's not what I meant. You can't change what I meant no matter what you say; that criticism is flat-out invalid. And you have no replacement criticisms, despite implying you had some.
