Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then being a real problem in the longer term.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

Change is easy, except for the changed part.

The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.

Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.

I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training.

If you're utopian, you're never satisfied.