I am digging deeper into Thoughts on Smalltack & Agile after my check-in with Ward.
One question he posed regarding the intention behind fed wiki was particularly intriguing: "How do you write patterns in a way that has the feeling of the programming in Smalltalk?"
What is that feeling? Perhaps it is not about the objects or the message passing, but the dynamic between the two?
As I dug deeper into Alan Key's story today I came upon an interview with him in Fast Company that was fascinating. See Good Enough to Criticize
Many topics were covered in this article. But I found this part interesting, particularly in light of my exploration of the fed wiki with Ward:
>Putting a writing system into an oral society doesn’t actually do it, doesn’t change them. It requires something more, because the thing that’s important about writing and how it changes the thinking of the civilization is the literate aspects of it, the structure and the thought, in various ways. Anyway, so this is all stuff that’s water over the dam, but most people don’t understand it. Most people in media don’t understand it. >If you read [Marshall] McLuhan, the first thing you realize is: Wow, if we could make something like a printing press—but its content is the next level of dealing with complexity, beyond what we could do with prose and written-down mathematics and stuff like that—we can actually create a media environment that the acclimation to [which], just like the acclimation to the printing press, would be another level of thought. And by the way, we need it, because our technology is taking us into a place where we need another level of thought, beyond the level that it took to create it.
The structure and the thought... interesting...