You will be even more sad when you start researching the history of operating systems and systems programming and discover the safety that we already had in the 60's in systems like Burroughs that was destroyed by UNIX's industry adoption.
It's the "worse is better" approach or whatever that is called that set the 'not-quite-field' (thank you AK for this) back to where it started. To me it feels like we are in a hamster wheel of constant reinvention rather than using the software technologies of the 70ies (mainly from Xerox Parc) as a stepping stone. And whenever the methodologies break down we cry for the next framework/language/hardware platform to solve everything.
I for one would love to see a refresh about what is happening to OMeta and its family of technologies developed at Viewpoint [1]. Is this still ongoing?
Here's a presentation, while chronologically earlier, that is specifically about the Viewpoints STEPS project which includes a good segment on OMeta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAT4iewOHDs
As jgon mentioned, Alex (the author of OMeta) continues work on Ohm, his successor to OMeta. Also, various flavors of OMeta implementations live on in Smalltalk, Lisp, Javascript etc. Recently VPRI released their final annual report to the NSF publicly with indications that work is ongoing. So there are at least pockets of interest and activity.
That's actually the presentation I had in mind but I couldn't find it anymore. Searching with Alan Kay as a keyword is not a big help xD. Thank you for linking it. I'd love to play around with this stuff.
I can probably point you in the right direction for OMeta... what's you're preferred dynamic language?
The other material is a bit tougher to come by as I don't believe Viewpoints has released a code snapshot of what they've been working on to date. There are bits and pieces in terms of code drops but mainly what they've released are the NSF annual reports and various papers discussing aspects of STEPS on the VPRI web site (i.e. http://vpri.org/html/writings.php)
OMeta's successor library has been linked here, so that's not a problem. IMO it's a shame that Professor Kay never fully adopted OSS. Their new way of doing a whole OS sure is inspirational - I could even see it as a very interesting basis as a successor to Linux.
If you're looking for a continuation of OMeta check out what Alan's previous research lab CDG (I believe it is largely being folded into HARC) is working on with ohm: https://github.com/cdglabs/ohm
