Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Semi-offtopic: I've always been fascinated by the origins of religions, their evolution, potential re-definitions and conflicts with other ideas. Specifically, I like thinking about how the founding members of a set of ideas, might retrospectively analyze the entire history of their ideas, and the "idea set"'s metamorphosis into a religion whose followers now treat it as dogma.

I have this, entirely unprovable, theory that most founders of these types of "idea sets" are actually poly-ideological, i.e. giving weight to all possible ideas, and just happened to be exploring ideas which made the most sense at the time.

While I enjoy your thoughts on "object oriented", "functional", etc, I'd love to hear your thoughts about philosophy of religion and its origins (i.e. a slightly meta version of the conversation around "object oriented", "functional", etc). You may be one of a handful of humans able to provide me more data. Is this a topic that interests you, and is it something you think about? If it is something you think about, regarding the dogma you potentially accidentally helped instigate,

Did you and your peers intend for it to become dogma? The rest of my questions sorta assume you did not.

Retroactively, do you feel it was inevitable that these ideas, i.e. popular / powerful / effective ideas, which were espeically extremely effective at the time, became dogma for certain people, and potentially the community as a whole?

Either retroactively or at the time, did you ever identify moments when the dogma/re-definitions were forming/sticking? If so, did you ever want to intervene? Did you feel you were unable to?

Do you have any lessons learned about idea creation/popularization without allowing for re-definitions / accidentally causing their eventual turn into dogma?

Again, if this type of conversation doesn't interest you, or because it cloud potentially be delicate, you'd rather not have it in public, I'd understand.

Thanks regardless

Thanks for the input

Hi Alan, I'm a CS student thinking about graduate school.

1. Would you suggest going into a popular field that excites me but already has lot of brilliant students? (for example AI and ML)

Or rather into a not-so-popular field where maybe I can be of more help? (for example computational biology)

2. If I had to choose between studying my current favorite field at an average research group, or another still interesting field with a top group, would you suggest going with the latter for the overall learning experience?

Just a thought: Is it mostly select statements that your colleagues write? Because if they do, they might not fear accidentally altering the data. I found that new programmers can get confused by the difference between things that are immutable and those that aren't.

I have been designing and hacking my own languages (to varying degrees of completion) for almost as long as I have been programming. A lot of the time, their genesis is a thought like, "what if language X did Y?" or, "I've never seen a language that does this, this, and that... I wonder if that's because they're insane things to do?"

When you're working on a system, how do you approach the question, "Is this really useful, or am I spinning my wheels chasing a conceit?" Is the answer as simple as try it out and see what happens? Or do you have some sort of heuristic that your many years of experience has proven to be helpful?