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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#251

Post by gnaritas »

alankay wrote: post #158
dookahku wrote: post #146

You 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?

There's coming up with ideas: learn to dream while you are awake, the ideas are there. There's coming up with a good idea: learn how to not get buried in your ideas (most are mediocre down to bad even for people who have "good idea skills"!) I write down ideas in notebooks to get rid of them. Every once in a while one will capture a different point of view. And, there's the Princeton Tea joke of scientists comparing…

> There's coming up with ideas: learn to dream while you are awake, the ideas are there.

Any advice on how to do that, especially for those of us who are completely non-visual thinkers (aphantasia)?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#252

Post by alankay1 »

IonoclastBrig wrote: post #189

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 u…

I keep ideas on the back burners for a long time. (The nature of the ideas will determine whether this heuristic works well.)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#253

Post by niftich »

numlocked wrote: post #240
losvedir wrote: post #168

At 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) *…

SQL is declarative. Compare: for user in table_users: if user.is_active: return user.first_name; vs: SELECT first_name FROM users_table WHERE is_active It's unfortunate that the order of the clauses in SQL is "wrong" (e.g. you should say FROM, WHERE, SELECT: Define the universe of relevant data, filter it down, select what you care about), but it's still quite easy to wrap your mind around. You are asking the compute…

Along this point, C# and VB.NET have SQL-like expressions that can be used for processing, called LINQ [1]. They even get the order of the clauses correct!

A feature like this may help your programmers who are used to thinking in terms of filter -> select -> order.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397927.aspx

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#254

Post by patrickk »

stcredzero wrote: post #209
chjohasbrouck wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 q…

Which Scott Adams said this, and where is it from? The Dilbert guy. It's from: https://amzn.com/1591847745

Here's a quote that leapt off the page at me:

Just after college, I took my first airplane trip, destination California, in search of a job. I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early 60s. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process.

This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are that the best job for you won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.

This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#255

Post by sebastianconcpt »

alankay wrote: post #179
miguelrochefort wrote: post #60

Do 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 ...

Indeed. It's like most languages punish exploration instead of rewarding it. Intellectual curiosity gets bullied that way.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#256

Post by alankay1 »

testmonkey wrote: post #79

What do you think about a "digital Sabbath," [1] specifically in the context of touchstones like: Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect [2] Edge's annual question, How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think? [3] Carr's Is Google Making Us Stupid? [4] ...and other common criticisms of "information overload" [1] http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/ [2] http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html [3] https://ww…

Candles, wine and bread aren't technologies? Hard to take this seriously. (And I like to play music, and both music and musical instruments are technology, etc.)

A better issue is not getting sucked into "legal drugs" that have no nutritional value.

"We are already stupid" -- this is why things could be much much better but aren't. We have to start with ourselves, and a positive way to do this is to ask "what can real education really do to help humanity?"

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#257

Post by siteshwar »

alankay1 wrote: post #217
siteshwar wrote: post #214

Hi Alan, You have an interesting reading list at http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp . However it seems that it was created long time back. Are there any other books that you would like to add to this list ?

Take a look at the HN discussion on this -- perhaps someone will supply a URL?

I could not find any books that you have personally recommended reading at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165. It might be because there would be too many of them. I would be specifically interested in computers category.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#258

Post by stcredzero »

alankay wrote: post #215
stcredzero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what do you think about the concept of "gamification?" Do you think high densities of reward and variable schedules of reward can be exploited to productively focus human attention and intelligence on problems? Music itself could be thought of as an analogy here. Since music is sound structured in a way that makes it palatable (i.e. it has a high density of reward) much human attention has been focused on the ph…

I certainly don't think of music along these lines. Or even theater. I like developed arts of all kinds, and these require learning on the part of the beholder, not just bones tossed at puppies.

I've been playing traditional music for decades, even qualifying to compete at a high level at one point. There is a high density of reward inherent in music, combined with variable schedules of reward. There is competition and a challenge to explore the edges of the envelope of one's aesthetic and sensory awareness along with the limits of one's physical coordination.

Many of the same things can happen in sandbox style games. I think there is a tremendous potential for learning in such abstracted environments. What about something like Minecraft, but with abstracted molecules instead of blocks? Problems, like the ones around portraying how molecules inside a cell are constantly jostling against water molecules, could be solved in such environments using design. Many people who play well balanced games at a high level often seem to be learning something about strategy and tactics in particular rule systems. I suspect that there is something educationally valuable in a carefully chosen and implemented rule system.

Also perhaps, it's so much easier to exploit such mechanisms to merely addict people, that overwhelms any value to be gained.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#259

Post by torstenB »

Beside objects one true revolutionary idea in Smalltalk is the uniformity of meta facilities - an object knowing about itself and being able to tell you.

I see so many dev resources burnt just because people build boring UIs or persistence bindings by wiring MANUALLY in traditional languages. All this is a no-brainer when enough meta infos (objects and relations) are available and a program is reflected as data as in Smalltalk (not dead text). You can not only transform data but also your code. Pharo now makes some more additonal steps to enhance reflection (metalinks, slots, etc).

What do you see as next steps in using metadata/-infos for (meta)programming ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#260

Post by alankay »

yazaddaruvala wrote: post #181
alankay wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Object oriented to me has always been about encapsulation, sending messages, and late-binding. You tell me ...

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, theor…

Bob Barton once called systems programmers "High priests of a low cult" and pointed out that "computing should be in the School of Religion" (ca 1966).

Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds of caching Kahneman's "System 1" does for us for real-time performance and in lieu of actual thinking.

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