True message passing is one of the key ideas behind smalltalk which would improve computer security considerably. This is analogous to the design of the internet that he references. The internet scales well. So imagine building entire computing systems this way.
If smalltalk is late binding and message passing, I think it's interesting that modern large scale webapps (say Netflix or Google) do just that just not inside process and server boundaries. I'd guess that Alan Kay would think that's a bastardization, and there are loads of complications but it's a definite improvement over the large php ball of mud monolith you might have seen at say Box or Facebook 10-15 years ago. Because the 'object' boundaries are so coarse you can also better leverage the few people inside an org who know how to design, scale, improve robustness and secure systems. If architecture is the metaphor, it's still pretty much piling mud bricks but at least there are corbeled arches, streets, city walls, public buildings and a rudimentary notion of style.
As for LLMs I think that long form typeahead is the right way to think about it.
I don't think he would think it is a bastardization. HTTP is 100% message passing. You have an object reference (url) and you pass a message to it with POST. State and behavior is encapsulated. In fact, one of the desireable properties of message passing is that it is easy to distribute across process and machine boundaries.
How would it improve it, though? Dynamically-typed languages tend to introduce gradual typing after a while to increase reliability and predictability, and the end game of that (static typing) is the antithesis of late binding. Message passing only improves security by adding a validation layer, but managed languages (JVM, CLR, etc.) effectively do the same.
> The internet scales well. So imagine building entire computing systems this way.
That’s very similar to microservices, and look how messy these tend to get. The internet scales well because it’s a network with flexible capacity and attached processing power, and because its clients are either human users who can deal with failure modes, or software with stable and well-specified point-to-point protocols.
It’d be a big improvement. Rather than call a linked library function you’d send a message to whatever it was you needed the library function for.. this reduces the buffer overflow exploit potential and what not. That alone is a huge win.
