Daniel Henry Holmes Ingalls Jr.: The Live Web. Drag 'n drop in the cloud

What Hacker News said

Recommends mmiller · 2016-06 · on “Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today”

It's difficult at this point to come up with an example, since we don't have it yet (that I know of), but to give you an idea, take a look at Lively Kernel [LINK] If you want a demo, you can take a look here: [this video]

Recommends apaprocki · 2019-09 · on “Smalltalk-72 Instruction Manual (1976) [pdf]”

Dan Ingalls himself presenting his continued work in the browser at JSConf US 2012 (whole conf was packed in, standing-room only): [this video] Surprised that video has so few views!

Recommends morphle · 2026-02 · on “Show HN: A native macOS client for Hacker News, built with SwiftUI”

I will not invest any time in improving badly designed software. You can't fix a broken wheel. Your HN newsreader app tries to improve the broken wheel. The least you could have done is make the comment edit field WYSIWYG, make it modeless, see what the text will look like while you type, not after you click update or when you click edit in the tread reader. Your code is just a very limited webbrowser. The webbrowsers, html are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the designer of personal computing, explains why [LINK] This lecture Alan aimed at this audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed this broken wheel 20 years after Alan had show

Recommends morphle · 2026-02 · on “CERN rebuilt the original browser from 1989”

You can't fix a broken wheel. This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel. The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why: [LINK] Some of the comments of youtube are fun too. This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better. Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows ho

Cites gambler · 2019-07 · on “The challenges of teaching software engineering”

Sounds more like "the challenge of using a mish-mash of non-integrated tools with no interface". Developers could definitively solve this by moving away from 70+ year old abstractions (files, terminal) towards things more in line with Smalltalk ideas. But I guess it's better to make thousands of beginners suffer each year, instead of admitting that the current way of doing things is conceptually flawed and outdated. [LINK] [LINK] [this video] [LINK] (And no, there is nothing special about copy-pasting commands and Unix pipelines that cannot be easily recreated in UI if the UI is designed to be programmable. )

Cites JHonaker · 2023-04 · on “Plan 9 from User Space”

I have been using Emacs as my daily driver for about a decade. It's the closest thing we have to a "popular" Smalltalk environment. The desire to bring everything into Emacs is the same desire I felt after experiencing what computing could be in Smalltalk. One of the really striking things that you're confronted with in a modern Smalltalk is the Morphic UI system. Imagine that, with one click, you could drop into a new window with a live inspector and a (very freeform, repl-ish that's not a repl) REPL loaded into the internal context of any button, window, pane, scrollbar, you name it that you can see right now. (Even my own vocabulary is stifled with the traditional UI/UX we have now!) Now