[bobajeff]

Yeah, I was recently reading the history of smalltalk and some of it's creators goals was to make it possible for everyone to be "computer literate". That is everyone being able to make their own programs without specialist programmers doing it.

In that book it seems that Kay eventually gave up that idea. Noticing it seemed that people would take years to be capable of doing interesting stuff with computers.

Which I think might be why his later research was more about just making code smaller and more comprehensible by domain experts.

Edit: It is worth noting that the idea seems to have been picked up by Dynamicland via their Realtalk protocol. Though I suspect they have ways to go before achieving that goal.