191–200 of 931 posts
What advice would you give to those who don't have a HARC to call their own? what would you do to get set up/a community/funding for your adventure if you were starting out today? What advice do you have for those who are currently in an industrial/academic institution who seek the true intellectual freedom you have found? Is it just luck?!
I enjoy watching your presentations, but I'm sure there are some I've missed.
I get the impression from the book Dealers of Lightning that Bob Taylor played an indispensable role in creating Xerox Parc. What are the Bob Taylors of today up to, and why aren't they doing something similar? Edit: just noticed HARC and YC-Research. I'll check it out.
That said, Bob Taylor cannot be praised too highly, both for Parc and for his earlier stint as one of the ARPA-IPTO directors.
Simple answer: There aren't a lot of Bob Taylors in any decade (but there are some). Big difference between then and now is that the funders were "just right" back then, and have been "quite clueless" over the last 30 some odd years. An interesting very recent exception is what Sam Altman is doing -- this is shaping into the biggest most interesting most important initiative since the 70s.
What are your thoughts on the Semantic Web? Why do you think it hasn't succeeded yet?
What research have you been a part of that is the most promising, yet least known, and why do you feel it failed to become more well known?
Any memories or thoughts about Gregory Bateson?
A rather kind big bear of a guy, with lots of ideas (and maybe a bit too much baggage from the past ...)
Worth reading all "the Macy people", including Gordon Pask, Heinz von Forester, etc.
If you were to design your own high school curriculum for gifted students, what would it look like?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I "secretly" think that Self would have achieved that too (and even better because is not constrained to the artificial abstraction of classes) but it never had a chance due to its unsuccessful IDE.
Our cognitive system converges too much to objectify things to ignore. We compulsively do that. There is something about objects that fits our cognitive system better. It's a waste if we don't take full advantage of it.
Hi 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…
What is your preferred technology stack?
Biggest thanks for helping create the modern computer and its peripherals and helping advocate programming for children! Computers is the base which I enjoy the most as a hobby and make my living off.
What is your vision for the future of computing?