The Perl Journal July, 2004
Alan Kay, one of the truly great pioneers of the computer age, recently gave an interview to Fortune.com in which he lamented our lack of technological progress in recent decades, given the enormous potential of the computer. He lays part of the blame for this at the feet of business:
But business, instead [of education], has been the primary user of personal computers since their invention. And business, he says, "is basically not interested in creative uses for computers."Hang on. I think this is overstating the culpability of business. Business is completely interested in creative uses for computers, as long as those uses generate revenue. Show me a creative use of a computer that makes money, and I'll show you a business that has embraced it whole-heartedly.
If he wants to argue that the ways of making money with creative computing are out there, and businesses just can't figure out what they are, fine. But a failure of imagination is not the same thing as a lack of interest.
Sadly, where we clearly have had a failure of both interest and imagination is in our educational systems. Computers in our schools simply provide digital typewriters and windows onto the unrefined, often inaccurate information on the Web. Kids coming out of our schools tend to have a very fixed idea of what a computer is for, and no idea of its true potential.
This, of course, is not news to Alan Kay. His efforts with the kid-friendly Squeak Smalltalk implementation (http://www.squeakland.org/) prove that he's well aware of these problems, and is committed to fixing them.
I agree that there has been much squandered potential in the last couple of decades. And Kay is right to point to some of the most prevalent computer technologies today—word processing, spreadsheets, and e-mail—as simply digital analogues of paper-and-ink processes, which are hardly revolutionary. In fact, it could be argued that the only really revolutionary idea in computer technology in the past 20 years is the Web. But I don't think it's quite fair to hold the business world responsible for somehow having a stranglehold on our ability to use computers creatively.
Truly creative uses of technology usually represent pretty revolutionary ideas. But those revolutions don't come along very often. In order to be revolutionary, a technology has to be used by the masses—but the majority of users will not embrace a technology until its benefits become obvious. The idea behind it has to be compelling and, let's face it, most of us don't come up with revolutionary ideas. They tend to come from a small group of smart people.
How many ideas in computing in the last 20 years have been compelling enough to qualify as revolutionary? There have been many good ideas, and many have succeeded, but most have been evolutionary. I suspect that the reason we're not advancing any faster than we are has less to do with either a lack of imagination or a lack of interest, and more to do with the fact that the truly revolutionary ideas are, by their very nature, few and far between.
(To read the whole Fortune interview with Kay, go to http://www.fortune.com/ fortune/fastforward/0,15704,661671,00.html.)
Kevin Carlson
Executive Editor
The Perl Journal