Hey Alan, you once said that lisp is the greatest single programming language ever designed. Recently, with all the emergence of statically typed languages like Haskell and Scala, has that changed? Why do you think after being around for so long, lisp isn't as popular as mainstream languages like Java, C or Python? And lastly, what are your thoughts on MIT's switch to use Python instead of Scheme to teach their undergraduate CS program?
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
121–130 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#122Hi 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 wha…
If you don't have the time or energy for such projects then you CAN'T do them. The answer is there.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#123How do you seek out the people you choose to work with, now or in the past? Is it an active process, or do you find interesting people naturally glom around a nucleus of interesting work?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#124When you were envisioning today's computers in the 70s you seemed to have been focused mostly on the educational benefits but it turns out that these devices are even better for entertainment to the point were they are dangerously addictive and steal time away from education. Do you have any thoughts on interfaces that guide the brain away from its worst impulses and towards more productive uses?
We were mostly thinking of "human advancement" or as Engelbart's group termed it "Human Augmentation" -- this includes education along with lots of other things. I remember noting that if Moore's Law were to go a decade beyond 1995 (Moore's original extrapolation) that things like television and other "legal drugs" would be possible. We already had a very good sense of this before TV things were possible from noting…
Then what do you think about the concept of "gamification?" Do you think high densities of reward and variable schedules of reward can be exploited to productively focus human attention and intelligence on problems? Music itself could be thought of as an analogy here. Since music is sound structured in a way that makes it palatable (i.e. it has a high density of reward) much human attention has been focused on the physics of sound and the biomechanics of people using objects to produce sound. Games (especially ones like Minecraft) seem to suggest that there are frameworks where energy and attention can be focused on abstracted rule systems in much the same way.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#125What do you think of Bret Victor's work? ( http://worrydream.com/ ) Or Rich Hickey? Who do you think are the people doing the most interesting work in user interface design today?
Aren't Alan Kay and Bret Victor working together at SAP currently?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#126Hi 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 wha…
Yes. If it takes me longer to figure out how to use your library or framework than to just implement the functionality myself, there is no point in using the library.
Some people claim you should still use the 3rd party solution because of the cost of supporting the extra code you have written. But bugs can exist in both my code and the 3rd party code and I understand how to fix bugs in my code much more easily.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#127Hello Mr. Kay, Are you still going to be active with VRI or CDG now that HARC! has formed?
PS:
I once ran into you in Westwood and you invited me to check out the CDG lab. Unfortunately I missed you when I came by. I'm always tempted to try again, but I'd hate to interrupt the serious thinking of the fellows stationed up there.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#128What is your opinion on Operating Systems research and industry? I find the Linux monoculture tiresome.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#129Hi Alan,
what do you think about interactive theorem proving (ITP)? Assuming that you are aware of it, is it something that you have tried? If yes, how was your experience, and which system did you try? If no, why not? What do you think about ITP's role in the grander scheme of things?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#130Hi 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…
This is a tough question. (And always has been in a sense, because every era has had projects where the tool building has sunk the project into a black hole.)
It really helped at Parc to work with real geniuses like Chuck Thacker and Dan Ingalls (and quite a few more). There is a very thin boundary between making the 2nd order work vs getting wiped out by the effort.
Another perspective on this is to think about "not getting caught by dependencies" -- what if there were really good independent module systems -- perhaps aided by hardware -- that allowed both worlds to work together (so one doesn't get buried under "useful patches", etc.)
One of my favorite things to watch at Parc was how well Dan Ingalls was able to bootstrap a new system out of an old one by really using what objects are good for, and especially where the new system was even much better at facilitating the next bootstrap.
I'm not a big Unix fan -- it was too late on the scene for the level of ideas that it had -- but if you take the cultural history it came from, there were several things they tried to do that were admirable -- including really having a tiny kernel and using Unix processes for all systems building (this was a very useful version of "OOP" -- you just couldn't have small objects because of the way processes were implemented). It was quite sad to see how this pretty nice mix and match approach gradually decayed into huge loads and dependencies. Part of this was that the rather good idea of parsing non-command messages in each process -- we used this in the first Smalltalk at Parc -- became much too ad hoc because there was not a strong attempt to intertwine a real language around the message structures (this very same thing happened with http -- just think of what this could have been if anyone had been noticing ...)