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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#81

Post by alankay1 »

sebastianconcpt wrote: post #64

Hi Alan, 1. what do you think about the hardware we are using as foundation of computing today? I remember you mentioning about how cool was the architecture of the Burroughs B5000 [1] being prepared to run on the metal the higher level programming languages. What do hardware vendors should do to make hardware that is more friendly to higher level programming? Would that help us to be less depending on VM's while sti…

If you start with "desirable process" you can eventually work your way back to the power plug in the wall. If you start with something already plugged in, you might miss a lot of truly desirable processes.

Part of working your way back to reality can often require new hardware to be made or -- in the case of the days of microcode -- to shape the hardware.

There are lots of things vendors could do. For example: Intel could make its first level caches large enough to make real HLL emulators (and they could look at what else would help). Right now a plug-in or available FPGA could be of great use in many areas. From another direction, one could think of much better ways to organize memory architectures, especially for multi-core chips where they are quite starved.

And so on. We've gone very far down the road of "not very good" matchups, and of vendors getting programmers to make their CPUs useful rather than the exact opposite approach. This is too large a subject for today's AMA.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#87

Post by alankay1 »

16bytes wrote: post #78

Hi Alan, I'm preparing a presentation on how to build a mental model of computing by learning different computer languages. It would be great to include some of your feedback. * What programming language maps most closely to the way that you think? * What concept would you reify into a popular language such that it would more closely fit that mapping? * What one existing reified language feature do you find impacts t…

I think I'd ask "What programming language design would help us think a lot better than we do now (we are currently terrible!)

Certainly, in this day and age, the lack of safe meta-definition is pretty much shocking.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#88

Post by jjnoakes »

di wrote: post #66

Hi Alan, In "The Power of the Context" (2004) you wrote: ...In programming there is a wide-spread 1st order theory that one shouldn’t build one’s own tools, languages, and especially operating systems. This is true—an incredible amount of time and energy has gone down these ratholes. On the 2nd hand, if you can build your own tools, languages and operating systems, then you absolutely should because the leverage that…

I tend to do both in parallel and the first one done wins.

That is, if I have a problem that requires a library or program, and I don't know of one, I semi-simultaneously try to find a library/program that exists out there (scanning forums, googling around, reading stack overflow, searching github, going to language repositories for the languages I care about, etc) and also in parallel try to formulate in my mind what the ideal solution would look like for my particular problem.

As time goes by, I get closer to finding a good enough library/program and closer to being able to picture what a solution would look like if I wrote it.

At some point I either find what I need (it's good enough or it's perfect) or I get to the point where I understand enough about the solution I'm envisioning that I write it up myself.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#89

Post by testmonkey »

What role do people like Terry A. Davis (and his TempleOS) serve in imaging what's possible in computing? I'm thinking of Jaron Lanier's idea of society getting "locked in" after certain technical decisions become seemingly irreversible (like the MIDI standard).

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#90

Post by alankay1 »

emaringolo wrote: post #61

Do you still see an advantage of using Smalltalk (like Squeak/Pharo) as a general purpose language/tool to build software or do you think that most of its original ideas were somehow "taken" by other alternatives?

Smalltalk in the 70s was "just a great thing" for its time. The pragmatic fact of also wanting to run in it real-time fast enough for dynamic media and interactions and to have it fit within the 64Kbyte (maybe a smidge more) Alto rendered it not nearly as scalable into the future in many dimensions as the original ideas intended.

We have to think about why this language is even worth mentioning today (partly I think by comparison ...)

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