[9rx]

> I think microservices emerged for a different reason: to make more efficient use of hardware at scale.

Same thing, no? That is exactly was what Kay was talking about. That was his vision: Infinite nodes all interconnected, sending messages to each other. That is why Smalltalk was designed the way it was. While the mainstream Smalltalk implementations got stuck in a single image model, Kay and others did try working on projects to carry the vision forward. Erlang had some success with the same essential concept.

> I'm claiming that it's better not to do it that way.

Is it fundamentally better, or is it only better because the alternative was never fully realized? For something of modern relevance, take LLMs. In your model, you have to have the hardware to run the LLM on your local machine, which for a frontier model is quite the ask. Or you can write all kinds of crazy, convoluted code to pass the work off to another machine. In Kay's world, being able to access an LLM on another machine is a feature built right into the language. Code running on another machine is the same as code running on your own machine.

I'm reminded of what you said about "Parse, don't validate" types. Like you alluded to, you can write all kinds of tests to essentially validate the same properties as the type system, but when the language gives you a type system you get all that for free, which you saw as a benefit. But now it seems you are suggesting it is actually better for the compiler to do very little and that it is best to write your own code to deal with all the things you need.