OK, so I paraphrased. The full quote:


  The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. -- Alan Kay.


I am trying to understand the history of the Internet and the web, and this statement is hard to understand. I have read elsewhere that the Internet is now used for very different things than it was designed for, and so perhaps that factors in.

What makes the Internet so well done, and what makes the web so amateurish?

(Of course, Alan Kay is fallible, and no one here is Alan Kay, so we can't know precisely why he said that, but what are some possible explanations?)

*See also the original interview*.

He actually elaborates on that very topic on the second page of the interview.  It's not the technical shortcomings of the protocol he's lamenting, it's the vision of web browser designers.  As he put it:


  You want it to be a mini-operating system, and the people who did the
  browser mistook it as an application.


He gives some specific examples, like the Wikipedia page on a programming language being unable to execute any example programs in that language, and the lack of WYSIWYG editing, even though it was available in desktop applications long before the web existed.  23 years later, and we're just barely managing to start to work around the limitations imposed by the original web browser design decisions.
