I'm bookmarking that. Appreciate the link. You're mischaracterizing it a bit, though. He usually gave the specific counter-example(s) of what was there first so person could look it up. The only one I disagreed with was Prolog for declarative programming. "Portman" was right that real-world use of it typically requires extra steps for the how as much as the what. I've read many horror stories, even for modern implementations.

That SO thread is so far above the SO average that I wouldn't feel right nitpicking anything about it. I appreciated that Kay complimented a few ideas he thought were good.

The whole "that idea was invented in the 60s/70s" thing is interesting because it so often triggers a meta-discussion about progress and what makes it difficult. I always want to take a different approach, drop everything, and really examine and dissect the thing and why the idea hasn't been advanced or abandoned. Depth-first search vs. breadth-first search, or something, I guess...

Kay is the reductio but forgot the absurdum. The natural numbers are the most recent invention in computer science. The rest is just implementation details.