For those who are unaware, this was headed by Alan Kay and was researching various concepts in human-computer interaction, including ideas about the future of coding (http://www.vpri.org/work/ifnct.htm).

It's a real shame to see them close up shop, we need that kind of research to continue.

This hits home for me.... it was an unspoken dream of mine to apply to join VPRI, motivated by a side-project that I believed falls under their interests. I never did apply. Which was probably the right call; I was naive, lacking any relevant credential, and I don't even really know what they are or if they take 'applications'. But still. Sometimes it's those weird little dreams, that we wouldn't dare tell anyone, that keep us going. I worked on that project for years before running out of steam. So now I sigh and acknowledge a door is long since closed.

Would love to spend my time somehow funded, even minimally, to build the crazy ideas that I believe in and think could actually matter, instead of the much less interesting or important work of my day-job. But I suppose that's most of us here on HN.

Dang. I used to look forward to the 20KLOC OS/GUI/IDE. I guess they never really achieved that.

Maybe it was just time for Alan Kay to retire.

They actually did... to a degree. The last artifact I'm aware of was called Frank[1] and incorporated a number of designs, concepts and DSLs the group presented and wrote papers[2] about over the years the project was active. However, I believe Alan was disappointed that he never achieved the 'from the ground up' deliverable that he really wanted as Frank relied on Squeak as its VM and OS. I think what he really had in mind was to have it at least generate its own low level machine code and possibly synthesize its own logic, where necessary, using FPGAs. (I may be imagining the FPGA part but seem to recall him talking about that at one point)

So while they never achieved the incredibly ambitious goal of everything in 20kloc, or doing it exactly how he wanted to, I think they showed it could be done (at least within that order of magnitude.) The amazing part is the incredible economy of some of the major subsystems they built.[3] Finally, they did assemble it all into a working demo. Unfortunately, without further funding that's where it ended.

[1] IIRC, it was because it was a bit of a Frankenstein solution: parts in Smalltalk, some serious hacks to the Smalltalk image, a couple of VM plugins in C for performance, parts in JavaScript, parts in various DSLs etc.

[2] All of which are publicly available including the code. While it's a bit high level and some of the concepts weren't fully fleshed out, I have managed to get some major pieces of it working with my own code so can attest to the fact that it does work and is useful as a starting point at least.

[3] The first time I really started looking under the covers of OMeta I kept wondering 'where the hell is the code?' After a while I realized that it was all there: it's one of the more amazing uses of recursion and (effectively) self-modifying code I've seen.

This group blew up very suddenly, leaving a lot of unfinished work. They didn't even properly release the work they had done on GitHub or someplace similar. It's just not like Alan Kay to do that.

https://awarth.blogspot.com/

Note that Warth's name is missing from the 2012 STEPS report.

Piumarta went to Japan.

There's something we don't know.

For a bit of follow-on, there is Alex Warth's homepage:

http://www.tinlizzie.org/~awarth/

yeah OMeta - interesting idea thanks for noting this, I was unaware (busy with other things lately)

I am pretty sure I saw the demo running in my browser for this, the link was at the end of one of the talks I think. Will post here if I find it

Is it true that they never achieved it? I thought they basically did. You can see the system in action in various talks by Alan Kay.