At SPLASH 2024 there were a few talks and sessions that felt a bit like lamentations.

Richard P. Gabriel’s keynote
Alan Kay’s interview with Gilad Bracha, as part of REBASE
Bracha’s own talk later in the day
Konrad Hinsen’s Onward! essay talk.

A common theme across these was that abandonment of “Programming Systems” and the rise of systems without elegance, introspection, trust or capability.

At the end of Hinsen’s talk, I posted on Mastodon:

The lamentations about the state technology at SPLASH are all lamentations of Capitalism.

Only a few come close to saying it explicitly tho.

I actually think Alan Kay came closest:

Wow, what a terrible waste of these kids lives to have an undergraduate degree in computing. Because think about what they could actually be learning, if they weren’t taking up all this time learning almost nothing interesting. And that learning they would do would actually make them much more sensitive to the new things they could be learning about.

And, of course, that’s not the whole story, because, let’s face it, things are very different than they were in the 60s and 70s, especially with regards to life-affecting things like, for instance, real-estate prices which are not counted in inflation, and in California have been more than a factor of ten, over regular inflation. And this has changed the goal structure of lots of kids going to college.

So, why don’t people build these sorts of systems anymore? Why is research focused on so many industrial applications? Why is it build-build-build? Why are universities failing to be bastions of knowledge creation?

Capitalism. Maybe too pithy.

More specifically, the problem is the precarity & lack of surplus of modern unrestricted rentier capitalism. Graduate students struggle with high rents, low stipends, heavy work loads and big loans. Lecturers have full teaching loads and are paid very little. Professors are writing grants to fund students, and no one seems to have any time to sit and think and play and produce beautiful results.

I talked to an undergraduate student at SPLASH, and he was telling us about some neat work he helped with to do LLMs and code auto-completion. The attendee next to me after hearing his brief pitch immediately asked “Are you planning on commercializing this?”, and I died a little inside. More, when the undergrad student replied in the affirmative.

The title of this blog post is at least a little sarcastic, but I think is an honest to goodness truth: If you want to build a future that involves beautiful systems like Smalltalk, you must first rebuild the economic environment wherein it could be built. Wherein it could succeed! These systems idealized in lamentations at SPLASH all seem to me to be products of economic surplus combined with the right people. We need an economy that has surpluses around for people to do explorations.

To be clear: I actually don’t really agree with a lot of the lamentation the Smalltalk & Lisp people feel. I think many of them undervalue the world we actually have. Nevertheless, I think we are missing exploration today. The ability to build systems, and sit with them, and let them evolve for years.

We need surplus projects; we need the things built when people have the freedom to play, the freedom to create. Some people, unbound from the strictures of having to work themselves to the bone to eat, will produce plays, will produce symphonies.

What about open-source? Open Source can unlock some surpluses, it’s true! But nor is it without its well known problems.

Maybe, if we can build a more just future, we’ll have SPLASH without so much lamentation.