I was verifying the Alan Kay quote: “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible” and came across a Quora answer by him that provides a lot of useful context. See https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-story-behind-Alan-Kay-s-ad... Here are two excerpts
"I think I came up with this slogan at Parc during discussions wrt children, end-users, user-interfaces, and programming languages. Chuck Thacker (the genius behind the Parc hardware) also liked it and adopted it as a principle for many of his projects.
So e.g. Smalltalk needed to work with children and end-users even more intuitively than (say) JOSS or Logo. But we also wanted to write the entire system in itself, so that those who were curious — especially later on — could “pop any hood” in the system and see a live program/object written in exactly the same terms as what the children were learning.
Similarly, the GUI had to be easily learnable by children, but — looking ahead — it had to handle “50,000 kinds of things we hadn’t thought of done by 50,000 programmers we hadn’t met” and be as simple as possible." Alan Kay
Neal Stephenson explores similar ideas in his "In the Beginning was the Command Line."
"Another part of this was that we were determined to have a very easy to learn UI would also incorporate end-user programming (scripting) as a natural part of it — in other words to combine what had to be simple yet possible with the programming language with what had to be simple yet possible with the UI.
The general zeitgeist against this idea — both back then and now. Basically: those artifacts that do simple things usually wall off next levels of complexity, and those that do complex things don’t do anything simply.
But, given that there have been some really good examples of how to do both, it’s hard not to see most computer people as (a) not caring, or (b) being lazy or unskilled, or (c) both." Alan Kay
Bonnie Nardi explores the value of this approach in "A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing"
I will use it for my "Quotes for entrepreneurs collected in Sep-2020" blog post (full set going back to 2006 at https://www.skmurphy.com/blog/category/quotes/). I will show the basic version and this twitter-length one that incorporates context from his Quora answer:
"Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible. Despite good examples to the contrary, it's unfortunate that those artifacts that do simple things usually wall off next levels of complexity, and those that do complex things don’t do anything simply."
Alan Kay
I like to find the original source of a good quote, one of two things often happens: the person credited did not actually say it, someone else do who has other insights to offer; the quote is part of a longer passage that adds value to the original quote.
"I think I came up with this slogan at Parc during discussions wrt children, end-users, user-interfaces, and programming languages. Chuck Thacker (the genius behind the Parc hardware) also liked it and adopted it as a principle for many of his projects.
So e.g. Smalltalk needed to work with children and end-users even more intuitively than (say) JOSS or Logo. But we also wanted to write the entire system in itself, so that those who were curious — especially later on — could “pop any hood” in the system and see a live program/object written in exactly the same terms as what the children were learning.
Similarly, the GUI had to be easily learnable by children, but — looking ahead — it had to handle “50,000 kinds of things we hadn’t thought of done by 50,000 programmers we hadn’t met” and be as simple as possible." Alan Kay
Neal Stephenson explores similar ideas in his "In the Beginning was the Command Line."
"Another part of this was that we were determined to have a very easy to learn UI would also incorporate end-user programming (scripting) as a natural part of it — in other words to combine what had to be simple yet possible with the programming language with what had to be simple yet possible with the UI.
The general zeitgeist against this idea — both back then and now. Basically: those artifacts that do simple things usually wall off next levels of complexity, and those that do complex things don’t do anything simply.
But, given that there have been some really good examples of how to do both, it’s hard not to see most computer people as (a) not caring, or (b) being lazy or unskilled, or (c) both." Alan Kay
Bonnie Nardi explores the value of this approach in "A Small Matter of Programming: Perspectives on End User Computing"