i was on the internet in 01992: before adsense, before monkey punchers, before geocities, before amazon, but not before dot-com, as my references to lynx and the nsf should have told you. money was a big factor but not in the way you are describing
This quip by him from OOPSLA '97 is well-known:
I made up the term object oriented. And I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind..
A little less well-known are the words that immediately follow:
So, the important thing here is: I have many of the same feelings about Smalltalk
As for where he wants Smalltalk to go, that's what Squeak was for. He talked about it on plenty of occasions, at least one of which was also before OOPSLA, and actually did get a research team together to develop it out in the late 2000s: https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Papers_from_Viewpoints_Re...
I've painted a bit of a skewed picture here, but not by much. You can still collect later computers, and people do, but it's understandable that most people are drawn to the "cambrian explosion" of the whole line of history, no? Variety is the spice of life, and plenty its staple food to be spiced.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/pepsis-nonsensical-logo-redesig...
So I'm not missing anything. You had exactly one criticism, and I explained over and over that it's not what I meant. You can't change what I meant no matter what you say; that criticism is flat-out invalid. And you have no replacement criticisms, despite implying you had some.
Cool, that means I'm clear of all accusations!
You have a born game designer on your hands. It is important to not assume this means they are super interested in programming. They may be, but game design is its own thing. HN will skew you towards programming first, naturally.
Check these out:
- Adventure Game Studio (https://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/)
- Twine (https://twinery.org/)
And these have more visual ways of programming which could let them express their ideas with less friction
- Dreams (Playstation)
- Unity (with Playmaker or Bolt visual scripting)
- Godot
And the other suggestions of Scratch are good, but I find Scratch to feel like a way to learn programming more than expressing game design.
Lastly, explore card and tabletop games with them. It’s a whole thing!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snap!_(programming_language)