ACM Queue has published an interview with Alan Kay: as usual he entertains us with memories of Smalltalk and the golden age of the 70s at Xerox PARC. While many news sources, such as Slashdot and Lambda the Ultimate are quoting snippets that deal with programming languages and computer hardware history, I found the last part of the interview much more interesting and original: there, he discuss the idea of user interfaces as extremely manipulable linguistic devices:

But I think we did do one good thing that hadn’t been done before, and that was to realize the idea of change being eternal.

The user interface, which is still the predominant approach today, is a user interface as the access to function. If the area is interesting, you eventually wind up with something that looks like the control panel of a nuclear reactor.

Corporate buyers often buy in terms of feature sets. But at PARC our idea was, since you never step in the same river twice, the number-one thing you want to make the user interface be is a learning environment—something that’s explorable in various ways, something that is going to change over the lifetime of the user using this environment. New things are going to come on, and what does it mean for those new things to happen?This means improvements not only in the applications but also in the user interface itself. Some of those ideas were quite manifest in the original Macintosh, but are much less manifest in the Macs of today—and of course never really made it to Microsoft. That just wasn’t their way of thinking about things, and I think a programming language is the same way. Even if the user is an absolute expert, able to remember almost everything, I’m always interested in the difference between what you might call stark meaning and adjustable meaning.