The flip side of the coin was that even good programmers and language designers tended to do terrible extensions when they were in the heat of programming, because design is something that is best done slowly and carefully.
The idea that hardware on networks should just be caches for movable process descriptions and the processes themselves goes back quite a ways. There's a real sense in which MS and Apple never understood networking or operating systems (or what objects really are), and when they decided to beef up their OSs, they went to (different) very old bad mainframe models of OS design to try to adapt to personal computers.
Science requires a society because even people who are trying to be good thinkers love their own thoughts and theories - much of the debugging has to be done by others.
In our society we have hard nerds and soft nerds. The hard nerds are the ones who used to have the slide rules at their belt; now they have calculators. The soft nerds are the ones who get violently ill whenever anybody mentions an integral sign.
I fear - as far as I can tell - that most undergraduate degrees in computer science these days are basically Java vocational training. I've heard complaints from even mighty Stanford University with its illustrious faculty that basically the undergraduate computer science program is little more than Java certification.
Bad User on Device is a medium that can dynamically simulate the details of any other medium, including media that cannot exist physically. It is not a tool, although it can act like many tools. It is the first metamedium, and as such it has degrees of freedom for representation and expression never before encountered and as yet barely investigated.
Some people worry that artificial intelligence will make us feel inferior, but then, anybody in his right mind should have an inferiority complex every time he looks at a flower.
If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It's just secret to this pop culture.
Quite a few people have to believe something is normal before it becomes normal - a sort of 'voting' situation. But once the threshold is reached, then everyone demands to do whatever it is.