Moldable development is coming to Common Lisp: codeberg.org/khinsen/clog-inspector

I've just learned about Alternate Reality Kit. I've searched through the archive and it was mentioned in passing a couple of times but I don't think this article was ever posted: worrydream.com/refs/Smith_R1987-_Experiences_With_The_Alternate_Reality_Kit,_An_Example_of_the_Tension_Between_Literalism_and_Magic.pdf . There is also a relatively recent video upload (video comes from 87 but it was uploaded only three years ago) which shows a more mature version in action: youtube.com/watch?v=w1HhPE0zV6g .

Its similarity to the system that I'm developing is just uncanny! I'm very interested in learning more about it. I tried to follow its history to figure out why it was abandoned but I've only been able to track that its development eventually led to the Self language (youtube.com/watch?v=3ka4KY7TMTU) which honestly seems like a step back from the original. I have my theories about why it might have been abandoned (which is that educational software is hard to sell) but would love to learn more about it from the people who might know more. Or maybe there are other systems that might have been derived from it?

I don't know, but I have my hypothesis as well as for why this and other user-empowering approaches were abandoned: the rise of PCs. In the late 80s and early 90s, the first PCs appeared and were seen as the obvious road to computing for everyone. But they were not powerful enough to run environments like Smalltalk. It's Basic we got instead. In parallel, professional high-end computing grew as well and that's where the money was. Academia followed the money.