Kay's Smalltalk vs the Object Network
Techie article! Scoring Smalltalk against my architectural vision
Here I’m going to compare Smalltalk against The Inversion - my architectural vision behind the Object Network - so please do read that first. I don’t go into lots of detail about my vision or its justification or why it’s better, this is just about how there’s nothing out there that does what *I* want.
Smalltalk’s full VM from the 70s
Smalltalk was originally more than a stand-alone language runtime, it was an entire VM that was meant to be basically the “OS” that the user would see and interact with from the turn of the key.
Instead of running monolithic applications, you had all different types of digital stuff available to you, all visible and interactable in the GUI, to mash up how you liked. Those chunks of different types of data were called "objects", of course.
Kay's objects had methods or messages on the outside - their “APIs” - and held data on the inside, not directly accessible to other objects. Thus it was an Imperative model. However, although they wrapped the data within this programming model, that data was still within a user's access and control, through object inspectors.
|Deconstructed
| |Declarative
| | |Decentralised
| | | |OS
| | | | |3D
|8 |8 |8 |4 |2 |
--+--+--+--+--+--+
ST|🔴|🔴|🔴|🟢|🔴| 4
--+--+--+--+--+--+Differences to the Object Network
Now, non-technical users faced with the Smalltalk object model clearly won’t find it particularly accessible; we want an "OS without applications" that everyone can use.
I believe that an OS with no apps is an opportunity to free our data and restore its primacy in the user's experience - so making their data first class over the code.
In other words, they could have flipped the model - to put the data on the outside of objects and given them internal animation. The UI would be much the same, allowing manipulation, linking and mashing up of objects, plus direct access to their state, but interactions between the objects would be state-dependency, like in a spreadsheet.
It was still the 1970s when an application was released that did acknowledge the power of the Inversion: the first spreadsheet - Visicalc. With Visicalc you saw the data in your spreadsheet cells before the functions behind them. But the Smalltalk and Visicalc models were never merged into "an OS without applications for non-techies".
Which is what the Object Network and OnexOS are doing, right now!
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