Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
For all the respect and admiration I have for Alan Kay, I think he&#x27;s often showing a lot of bad faith.<p>His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I&#x27;m sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him. Of course, part of it is &quot;design principles&quot;. But then do some common use cases.<p>When the abstraction meets reality we get comments like &quot;the iPad should have a pen&quot;. Which is really an interesting observation, but doesn&#x27;t quite rill the crowd like the abstract impressive-sounding stuff does. And you&#x27;d hardly call these isolated observation &quot;vision&quot;.<p>Clearly, the user interfaces we have today are sub-optimal, and I can make hundreds of factual remarks on what could be improved. But I don&#x27;t think this works out to a &quot;vision&quot;. In fact, a vision is I think sometimes bound to be too abstract. If we just had products where the shit was fixed relentlessly, I reckon we&#x27;d get to &quot;good&quot; without needing them.