Editing Alan Kay (section)

=== Reinventing programming ===
Kay has lectured extensively on the idea that the computer revolution is very new, and all of the good ideas have not been universally implemented. His lectures at the OOPSLA 1997 conference, and his ACM Turing Award talk, "The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet", were informed by his experiences with [[Sketchpad]], [[Simula]], [[Smalltalk]], and the bloated code of commercial software.

On August 31, 2006, Kay's proposal to the United States [[National Science Foundation]] (NSF) was granted, funding Viewpoints Research Institute for several years. The proposal title was "STEPS Toward the Reinvention of Programming: A compact and Practical Model of Personal Computing as a Self-exploratorium".<ref>{{cite web |last1=Kay |first1=Alan |last2=Ingalls |first2=Dan |author2-link=Dan Ingalls |last3=Ohshima |first3=Yoshiki |last4=Piumarta |first4=Ian |last5=Raab |first5=Andreas |author5-link=Andreas Raab |url=http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf |title=Steps Toward The Reinvention of Programming – A Compact And Practical Model of Personal Computing As A Self-Exploratorium |access-date=March 23, 2013|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130508090431/http://www.vpri.org/html/work/NSFproposal.pdf|archive-date=May 8, 2013|url-status=dead}} Proposal to NSF – Granted on August 31, 2006</ref> STEPS is a [[recursive acronym]] that stands for "STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems". A sense of what Kay is trying to do comes from this quote, from the abstract of a seminar at Intel Research Labs, Berkeley: "The conglomeration of commercial and most open source software consumes in the neighborhood of several hundreds of millions of lines of code these days. We wonder: how small could be an understandable practical 'Model T' design that covers this functionality? 1M lines of code? 200K LOC? 100K LOC? 20K LOC?"<ref>{{Cite web |last=Kay |first=Alan |title=How Simply and Understandably Could The "Personal Computing Experience" Be Programmed? |url=http://www.intel-research.net/berkeley/viewseminarabstract.asp?index=605 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070625105727/http://www.intel-research.net/berkeley/viewseminarabstract.asp?index=605 |archive-date=June 25, 2007 |date=November 27, 2006}}</ref>
[[File:Alan Kay at the Getty Museum.jpg|thumb|right|Computer scientist Alan Kay]]