Yes exactly; I think of the web as a modest and humble (and thus brilliant) extension of Unix. It adds simple networking and hyperlinks to hierarchical namespaces (and extends hierarchical names as URLs).
Those principles scale. GET/POST is basically the Unix/Plan 9 principle of read() / write() of declarative formats.
On a small scale you can avoid that and use more tightly coupled RPC (and maybe you should), and you can design more elaborate VMs.
On a large scale it all becomes REST (e.g. what do you talk to Github with, what does a Debian repo look like, etc.). It's less about the technical design and more about the social issues -- who owns each end of the wire? If you own both ends of the wire, you have a much different problem, but that's not the problem the web is solving.
When watching the Kay talk, I was struck that he seems to be lumping every "good" in software engineering under the term "object oriented". Virtual machines are objects. Servers are objects. Numbers should be objects. All abstraction is objects. It was not really a useful or enlightening way of thinking about the world.
Those principles scale. GET/POST is basically the Unix/Plan 9 principle of read() / write() of declarative formats.
On a small scale you can avoid that and use more tightly coupled RPC (and maybe you should), and you can design more elaborate VMs.
On a large scale it all becomes REST (e.g. what do you talk to Github with, what does a Debian repo look like, etc.). It's less about the technical design and more about the social issues -- who owns each end of the wire? If you own both ends of the wire, you have a much different problem, but that's not the problem the web is solving.
Previous comment on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6131335
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Funny thing about objects, I went back to my comment from 8 years ago and also noted that Kay was obsessed with "objects" in a way that's not useful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5516960
When watching the Kay talk, I was struck that he seems to be lumping every "good" in software engineering under the term "object oriented". Virtual machines are objects. Servers are objects. Numbers should be objects. All abstraction is objects. It was not really a useful or enlightening way of thinking about the world.