Comment by linguae
7 hours ago
Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame) has a similar, related explanation: computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bbm:978-3-319-90008-7/...). There are thousands, maybe millions, of developers who have little knowledge of the history of our field. I’ve found this true even of graduates from highly-ranked computer science bachelor’s programs. Think of all of the current-day LLM researchers and engineers who have never heard of Minsky, McCarthy, Lisp machines, and other aspects of the history of AI before we learned that attention was all we needed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple’s UI/UX teams are staffed with people who have never heard of Don Norman, Bruce Tognazzini, Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, Susan Kare, Larry Tesler, and other pioneering figures who contributed to Apple’s legendary 1980s and 1990s software.
It’s a lack of onboarding and knowledge transfer, combined with an Eternal September of thousands new CS grads being constantly produced annually, who are sadly not being taught enough history of computing at their universities.
My dream as a CS professor is to help rectify this, at least amongst my students.
It’s when people confuse User Experience Design, which is a systemic and architectural discipline, with UI Art, which is an aesthetic discipline. If you have someone who is professionally the latter doing the former job, you get things people think look good but don’t work well.
This isn’t even to knock either: UI artists are essential to making a UI understandable and enjoyable. But people think the skill sets are the same, and they aren’t.
Disclaimer: am a UX Designer.
Outside of big tech I’ve never met a UX designer who wasn’t just a graphic designer. Not a single one.
I have met exact one and the stuff he made was amazing
I concur, though I fear that as a discipline we haven't done ourselves any favours here in how we pass knowledge between generations.
In decades past, books and journals served as the primary mechanism for capturing and transferring CS and Software Engineering knowledge. Older knowledge was curated and remained easily accessible.
When I studied CS and engineering in the early 2000s, I learned a lot about the history and evolution of the field simply by browsing old books on the shelves of the university library. Thousands of them. I read back to the 60s and 70s, and I felt it really helped me have a broader perspective and evolution of the field.
That same university library has now transitioned to mostly online materials. The physical collection has been drastically pruned based on what is currently relevant and in demand.
The online collections don't have the same historical depth. And websites and online repositories come and go - think of the vast troves of knowledge that once existed on Usenet that have been lost to obscurity.
I also think the joy of browsing through topics you didn't know existed as given way to search-driven retrieval.
In our efforts to use computers to document what we know about computers, we have lost all that was good about not using computers for information management.
It’s hard to fully pass on UX knowledge. For one, a lot of software and hardware isn’t available, including recent software. You can’t use a version of Slack from 2019 or AIM from 2001, for instance.
But also, it’s hard to convey the full experience of actually using old software as a tool (or toy)—trying to maintain your company records in Lotus 1-2-3 or looking up something in Microsoft Encarta knowing that if you couldn’t answer your question you’d need to go to the library, or even trying to solve a puzzle in a game with no reference materials.
I’m sure this is true of other technology: You can learn to ride a horse or read about how telephones and telegrams worked, but can you really capture the experience of riding from NYC to Philadelphia in 1840 or trying to convey an urgent business message the same way in 1920?
"Computing is a pop culture with little regard for the past" this literally just clicked so many pieces in my brain all at once I had to close my eyes and sit with it.
I worked with all of the aforementioned people at various companies and cannot see myself working at any of the companies where this experience would be useful or could be transferred to others. Apple, when I left in 2006, was almost unbearable to me.
I don’t know if this means I am jaded, burnt out, overly cynical or what, but the thought of working at Apple, Google, Facebook or any other big tech company is anathema to me.
Steve Lemay worked with a bunch of us, including a very curmudgeonly Don Norman, but just look at what happened to Apple UX while he was there. Yes, he is now running the team and the small improvements may be a direct influence of his, but he sure was steam rolled by others the last twenty years.
> not being taught enough history of computing
Are they being taught any of significance? In school I only remember a blurb about Newton here or a blurb about Pascal there. Briefest of mentions about Unix at the start of a C class.
All the rest I had to dig up myself, from the Mythical Man Month to Edwin Black's book. Believe it was the Joel on Software blog who got me interested in those type of books, never knew they existed in school.
I had some hilarious experiences by telling people that they did well, now make the same thing again but make it better. I was quite surprised they put up with it many itterations and even more surprised that each round (with few exceptons) was actually better.
> Alan Kay (of Smalltalk fame)
Alan Kay (of Alan Kay fame)
"Things seem to hang on in computing just because they work a little bit." -Alan Kay
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8841428
Alan Kay also said this about his famous "Point of View is worth 80 IQ points" aphorism, which I think poignantly explains why React costs a net of 160 IQ points compared to Svelte:
>I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
I love this quote! When I taught programming language paradigms at San Jose State as an adjunct, I introduced this quote as a motivating factor for learning different ways of programming, particularly introducing functional programming, logic programming, Smalltalk, and the Common Lisp Object System to senior-year students who coded mostly in Java, Python, and C (though this was during the COVID pandemic, right before the advent of vibe coding).
Here's the whole thread from six days ago, started when I shared the "Folders" esolanguage article and hn discussion, which I think is interesting for students and language hackers:
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote to Owen Densmore, David Rosenthal, and Alan Kay:
Somebody took your filesystem-as-objects patent idea to the logical extreme!
https://github.com/SimHacker/moollm/blob/main/designs/postsc...
Owen and David can correct my history, since they're on the thread.
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Don
I should have said "prior art before Smalltalk" ...
Best cheers
Alan
On 16 Oct 2026, Don Hopkins wrote:
In a way, the patent is just pure prior art, plus perspective, which is worth a certain number of IQ points I've been told. ;)
Which pre-Smalltalk ancestors were you thinking of? Sketchpad's masters and instances, Simula's classes, and Multics search rules walking a hierarchy of directories all seem like pieces of it.
-Don
On 16 Oct 2026, Alan Kay wrote:
Hi Don
I have been keeping to "80" IQ points in the saying (thus avoiding inflation). However very few people have noticed there is no sign bit in the aphorism, and that it works just as well for "poor perspectives being worth negative 80 IQ points" (and I think we could claim inflation of stupidity in many bad directions these days ...).
I don't like to claim priority for any ideas (including my own). Bob Barton liked a great saying of Goethe's: "We should all share in the excitement of Discovery without vain attempts to claim Priority" and I imprinted on that in grad school.
So, without claiming priority, I would point to Engelbart's NLS for unifying the structure of the file system with the basic hierarchical structuring of their content (and this included how code was represented, written, and read). A few years later I used a different kind of unification in the FLEX machine that Ed Cheadle and I did in the mid-60s to have "every large thing" be an instantiable process, including things that were more "file-like".
This is just FYI, partly because of the above Goethe quote, partly because the FLEX project was done within the aerospace conglomerate LTV, and was proprietary. My thesis advisor Dave Evans had to go to considerable work to get permission for me to do my degree write ups on a tiny subset. The later Smalltalk was a "cold restart" on these ideas (and LTG was not a problem by then).
And -- for Smalltalk -- the notion to make "everything large and small" an object was a quick way to get going on the comparatively speedy Alto, and Dan Ingalls (and his Smalltalk group) were able to do most of the SW engineering to make Smalltalk act semantically as though everything was an object.
Best cheers
Alan