[deleted]
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
171–180 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#172Hi Alan,
A lot of the VPRI work involved inventing new languages (DSLs). The results were extremely impressive but there were some extremely impressive people inventing the languages. Do you think this is a practical approach for everyday programmers? You have also recommended before that there should be clear separation between meta model and model. Should there be something similar to discipline a codebase where people are inventing their own languages? Or should just e.g. OS writers invent the languages and everyone else use a lingua franca?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
HN has always worked informally. We don't have 'processes'; it isn't clear that we need them, and the thought of having to set them up makes my soul cry. But anyone who has concerns about fakes, abuses, and the like can always get an answer by emailing hn@ycombinator.com. We appreciate such emails because occasionally they point out actual abuses that we need to take care of!
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Could you give an example of what you mean by "safe meta-definition"? I'd like to understand this better.
I'm guessing safe meta-definition means type-safe meta-programming.
For example in Lisp, code is data and data is code (aka homoiconicity). This makes it very convenient to write macros (i.e. functions that accept and return executable code).
Unsafe meta-programming would be like the C pre-processor whose aptness for abuse make it a leading feature of IOCCC entries.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#175Hi Alan,
A lot of the VPRI work involved inventing new languages (DSLs). The results were extremely impressive but there were some extremely impressive people inventing the languages. Do you think this is a practical approach for everyday programmers? You have also recommended before that there should be clear separation between meta model and model. Should there be something similar to discipline a codebase where people are inventing their own languages? Or should just e.g. OS writers invent the languages and everyone else use a lingua franca?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#176Hi Alan. A lot has been made of the visions that your colleagues and you had that ultimately became the fabric of our industry.
Did you have any ideas, predictions or visions which ultimately didn't play out? (And any ideas on why?)
Thank you very much to your contributions to our industry. Anyone blessed to be working in this field today owes you an enormous debt of gratitude. You have made a dent in the universe.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#1771. 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 compu…
1. I actually don't think this way -- my actual interior is a kind of "hair-ball" and so questions are very helpful.
2. Let's do a dialog about this. Note that taking the process far enough starts resembling prayer to a deity and gives rise to many kinds of hedging. Math is completely expressible in ordinary language, but instead, the attempt to make it less ambiguous leads to conventions that have to be learned.
That said, have you thought about (say) objects needing to negotiate meaning with each other?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you give an example of what you mean by "safe meta-definition"? I'd like to understand this better.
Me too. But if he doesn't answer it he may mean how languages don't have a well designed meta protocol. See the one they built for CLOS in that good book.
This reminded me of an interesting dream I had. I dreamt I created a nice language with a meta protocol. In working with the language and using this protocol I changed the language into a different language which gave me insights on changing that language -- all through meta protocols. I woke up having a distinct feeling of what is means to not be plodding around in a Turing tarpit.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#179Do you believe that the gap between consuming software and creating software will disappear at some point? That is, do you expect we will soon see some homoiconic software environment where the interface for using software is the same as the interface for creating it? I feel like the current application paradigm cannot scale, and will only lead to further fragmentation. We all have 100+ different accounts, and 100+ d…
Talked to a lawyer recently?
One of the most interesting processes -- especially in engineering -- is to make a model to find out what it is that you are trying to make. Sounds a little weird, but the model winds up being a great focuser of "attempts at intent".
Now let's contemplate just how bad most languages are at allowing model building and having optimizations being orthogonal rather than intertwined ...
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Learn a lot of other things, and at least one real science and one real engineering . This will help to calibrate the somewhat odd lore aka "computing knowledge". I would certainly urge a number of anthropology courses (and social psychology, etc), theater, and so forth. In the right school, I'd suggest "media theory" (of the "Mcluhan", "Innis", "Postman" kind ...)
Whenever I've gone to an anime con, it seems like the older genre masters like Yoshiyuki Tomino (Gundam) were always urging the audience to get to know something besides anime/manga. Specifically to go out and get involved in something to create media about , so as to avoid producing something completely self-referential and navel-gazing. That also seems to apply to the medium of programming. (As in: Do we really nee…
> It's also related to what Scott Adams urges. It's pretty hard to get to be in the top best 10% at a single field. It's much easier to be in the top 25% of two different fields, which would make you one of the top 10% of that interdisciplinary combination.
This is really great, I've been thinking about that for years. Which Scott Adams said this, and where is it from?
The best tech founders often seem to have this quality. They're by no means top 10% in any individual category, but they're strong in technology and in some specific non-tech-related domain. In the right setting, dividing your attention between tech and a non-tech-related domain can actually make you more specialized in a way, not less.