Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

How has your relationship with technology changed, especially in regard to its use politically and socially, as you've gotten older?

Hi Alan - the innovation from PARC appears to be the result of a unique confluence of hardware, software, market forces, recent government research investment, and Michelangelo-level talent for bringing big ideas to fruition.

Do you think that any factors that were significant back then are going to be difficult to reproduce now, as HARC gets started? Conversely are there novel aspects of today's environment that you wished for at PARC?

So what do you think of Scala?

It seems that dynamic or at least sloppily typed langauges like javascript and python have become more and more popular. Do you think typeless/dynamic languages are the future? I personally really like "classless OOP[0]".

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=6m

1. What do you wish someone would ask you so that you could finally share your thoughts, but nobody has broached as a subject?

2. (This question is about interactive coding, as a dialogue).

Human dialogs (conversations) are interactive. I think in the past computers were limited, and computer languages had to be very small (as compared with any human language + culture) so that a programmer could learn what the computer could do. But now that services can be connected (programming as a service?), would it make sense to have a dialogue? My example is that in the 1980s it wouldn't have made sense for any programming language to have a function called double() that just multiplies by 2. There's * 2 for that.

But in 2016, it makes sense for a beginner to write "and double it" and considerably less sense for a beginner to have to learn x *= 2 if they wanted to double a number.

Human language is also ambiguous. It would make sense for an interactive language to ask:

"Did you mean, set x equal to x multiplied by 2?" which most people would select, but maybe someone would select

"Did you mean, set x equal to the string "x" appended to the string "x"?"

For these reasons: do you think it would make sense to have an interactive programming language that is connected with a server you "talk" with interactively?

Or should programmers still have to learn a fixed programming language that has no room for interpretation, but instead a strict meaning.

Among other things, this means programmers can never write "it", "that", "which" to refer to a previous thing (since the referent could be ambiguous if the compiler doesn't confirm.) But every human language includes such shorthand.

I'd love to hear your thoughts regarding a connected, interactive programming process similar to the above (or just on whatever lines).