Given that tablets have lived up to the Dynabook concept, what do you think about seeing 3 year olds with iPads?
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
161–170 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#162What do you think about functional languages like Haskell, OCaml etc ?
They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents).
And then there is the issue that we need to make "systems" ...
I like what a function is, and this idea should be used, but I think it is better used rather differently ...
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#163Reddit commenter implying this AMA is fake. How are HN accounts verified? How do we know this is a real AMA? Just curious.
I personally vouch that this isn't fake. (But anyone familiar with Alan's work could tell that just from reading his comments here—who could possibly fake these?) We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940227 and marked it off-topic.
"who could possibly fake these?"
Copying from other sources. I'm not saying it's fake, just curious about verification as someone claimed so.
For instance, your "vouch", are you an official HN account. How can I tell?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#164-- I was surprised that the HN list page didn't automatically refresh in my browser (seems as though it should be live and not have to be prompted ...)
Imagine: 1. trying to read something long, or 2. going off to a follow a link and to come back and respond, only to find that the page has been refreshing while you looked away. Now you have to scroll about to find the place you were at in order to respond or to continue reading the comments.
How about a little model of time in a GUI?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#165Do you consider the recent advances in AR/VR as a useful trend, or is it's emphasis on spatial movement mostly superfluous?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#166Hi 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…
Specifically with regards to languages and OS's, I wonder how much that cost/benefit equation shifts as things have become so much more complex, and as we continue to pile on abstraction layer after abstraction layer.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#167Looking at your 1972 Dynabook paper [1], would you make any changes to the Dynabook vision now? Also, what do you see as the biggest missing pieces (software or hardware) today? What current software gets closest to the vision?
[1] Everyone should really take a look at the Dynabook paper: http://history-computer.com/Library/Kay72.pdf
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#168At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered:
* Graphical programming environment (they run the queries
from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that)
* Instant feedback - run the query get useful results
* Compilation step with some type safety - will complain
if their query is malformed
* Are tables a "natural" way to think about data for humans?
* Job relevance
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#169You invented a lot of what I'm using this very instant to compose this message. I yearn to do great works of engineering and art, which I consider what you have done. How do you come up with ideas?
I'm not Alan, but I saw one of his talks[1] about how they did invent all those things we're using now, which you are very much referring to.
What he said was important was to have a big horizon, at least 10 years. Anything less would not do.
Then envision what should be possible in that time. "It would be ridiculous if $X wasn't possible in $Y years" and then backtrack on what would technically be required to make that happen.
Rinse repeat. He said that with good company support and a good team, you often found yourself delivering at half that time none the less (but again, you should never constrain yourself to that little, or else you will stress towards performing, instead of thinking properly about the problems needing to be solved).
Alan: Hope I didn't butcher your message too much :)
[1] I think it might be this one, but I honestly haven't checked. See it anyway. It's a good talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#170Do you still code today? If so what's your preferred language, editor, OS?