I'm no doubt your biggest fan. What do you think of the Simula inventors work?
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
111–120 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#112Hi 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…
Isn't the answer contained in the quote? Do a cost/benefit analysis of the "amount of time and energy" that would go "down these ratholes" versus the "the time not wasted in trying to fix other people’s not quite right tools."
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#113How can I get my thinking out of the/my box?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#114There's still no good languages for young kids in my opinion. Should we get LOGO back, including a turtle robot?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#115Why haven't machine learning and neural networks been applied to programming languages with as much interest as human languages? Wouldn't AI augmentation of writing computer code lead to faster breakthroughs in all other fields within computer science?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#116What is the best language to learn OOP concepts ?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#117What are the first 3 books I should read on the topic of teaching tech to kids? Thanks!
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#118Hi 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…
Isn't the answer contained in the quote? Do a cost/benefit analysis of the "amount of time and energy" that would go "down these ratholes" versus the "the time not wasted in trying to fix other people’s not quite right tools."
But how can you assess this until you have gone down those rat holes?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#119Do 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…
I think it is the only language that enables a single individual to understand a big and complex system like the development environment itself.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#120As a community, we often think on quite short time-scales ("What can we build right now, for users right now, to make money asap?"). I feel like you've always been good at stepping back, and taking a longer view.
So what should a designer or a developer be doing now, to make things better in 10 years, or 100 years?