Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Alan,

You have inspired me deeply, thank you. I love working with man's greatest invention, but I have a deep sense of dread. HN is very good about projecting a fantasy about the future, that technology can solve all problems. I would love to see a world where people use computers to compute. However, global warming is a real threat and my biggest fear is that our pop-culture will prevent us from solving our problems before the chance to solve them is taken away from us.

With such a huge threat to humanity on the horizon, do you maintain a sense of optimism here? Or will humanity forget how to "compute" the same way Europeans forgot how to make Roman concrete?

I don't have great advice (I found getting halfway decent funding since 1980 to be quite a chore). I was incredibly lucky to wind up quite accidentally at the U of Utah ARPA project 50 year ago this year.

Part of the deal is being really stubborn about what you want to do -- for example, I've never tried to make money from my ideas (because then you are in a very different kind of process -- and this process is not at all good for the kinds of things I try to do).

Every once in a while one runs into "large minded people" like Sam Altman and Vishal Sikka, who do have access to funding that is unfettered enough to lead to really new ideas.

Hi Alan,

I'm part of a generation who didn't grew up with the PDP but had LOGO and basic available in computers and calculators. With the Amstrad CPC it was possible to interupt a program and to change a few lines of code to make it do something else which was a great way to keep interested. And with calculator it was possible to code formulas to resolve/check problems.

But how would you teach programming today to a kid? Would you choose a particular medium such as a computer, a raspberry pi or even a tablet?

And if I may, do you recommend any reading for bedtime stories?

Thanks you, Kevin

There is a gang here.

Yes. I think they have been slowly getting better.

Visual Studio has let you do hot code editing for over a decade now, they call it "Edit and Continue"[0]. Only works for some languages (C#, Visual Basic/C++). It also lets you modify the program state while stopped on a break-point with code of your devising.

Most browsers also let you adhoc compose and run code without modifying the underlying programs.

Thanks to hardware performance counters, profilers are now able to profile code with much less impact on performance (eg: no more adjusting timeouts due to profiler overhead). Network debuggers are getting better at decoding traffic and displaying it in a more human readable format (eg: automatic gzip decompression, stream reassembly, etc).

[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bcew296c.aspx