Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would also like to know if he uses emacs or vim, or whatever. And if he thinks the editor is relevant.
Yikes!
possible takeaway: even Alan Kay knows not to wade into the religious war that is vi-or-emacs ;-)
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
311–320 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#312Does it suck getting old for you? Do you have stamina to make new stuff?
I'm old, very hard to stay on top of all the changes.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#313Hi Alan, I have three questions - 1. If you were to design a new programming paradigm today using what we have learnt about OOP what would it be? 2. With VR and AR (Hololens) becoming a reality (heh) how do you see user interfaces changing to work better with these systems? What new things need to be invented or rethought? 3. I also worked at Xerox for a number of years although not at PARC. I was always frustrated b…
Let me both acknowledge your questions, and also acknowledge that this forum (the media authoring tools) are not in scale with the needed answers ...
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#314Alan,
Thank you for doing this AMA!
I would love to hear your thoughts on how to "train" "System 1", in order to make "System 2" more powerful. Not necessarily here, due to the time factor, but if you find some time to think more deeply on this, please let me know and we can think through this together.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#315Many mainstream programming tools feel to be moving backwards. For example, Saber-C of the 1980s allowed hot-editing without restarting processes and graphical data structures. Similarly, the ability to experiment with collections of code before assembling them into a function was advance. Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?
Hot-editing updates behavior while keeping state, causing wildly unpredictable behavior given the way objects are constructed from classes in today's languages. The current approach to OO is to bootstrap fresh state from an external source every time the behavior changes so guarantees can be made about the interaction between behavior and state. It seems to me the equivalent of using a wheelchair because you might stumble while walking, the concern is genuine, but the cure is possibly worse than the affliction.
I don't know what the solution is. Perhaps a language with a fundamentally different view of objects, maybe as an ancestry of deltas of state/behavior pairings, somewhat like prototypes but inheriting by versioning and incrementally changing so that state and behavior always match up but still allowing you to revert to a working version. Likely Alan has some better ideas on what sort of language we need.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#316What do you think about functional languages like Haskell, OCaml etc ?
They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents). And then there is the issue that we need to make "systems" ... I like what a function is, and this idea should be used, but I think it is better used rather differently ...
If you feel like elaborating on this comment, I'd be most curious to read more detail.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#317Does it suck getting old for you? Do you have stamina to make new stuff? I'm old, very hard to stay on top of all the changes.
It doesn't suck "getting old" -- and you only find out about stamina by trying to do things ...
(We are fortunate that most of what is "new" is more like "particular 'news'" rather than actually "new". From the standpoint of actual categorical change, things have been very slow the last 30 years or so.)
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#318What is Actor Model lacking?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#319When will we get better at saying what we mean? I don't think this just important when speaking with computers, but also human-to-human interaction. What is the best interface for computer programming? I have settled on the keyboard with an emacs interpreter for now, but I'm curious if you believe voice, gestures, mouse or touch are or will be better ways of conveying information?
> When will we get better at saying what we mean?
The hard part is knowing what we mean - really knowing, not just thinking that we know.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#320I remember a few weeks back, you said that you wanted to take a closer look at the Urbit project (www.urbit.org). Just wondering if you had gotten the chance to do so, and, if so, what your thoughts were.
Do you have a link to where he mentioned Urbit?
I find the whole project (politics aside, though i wish this caveat was unnecessary) stunningly beautiful, especially the focus on verbalization (#spokenDSL), and having Alan Kay be interested in it is flattering even though I have no relation whatsoever :)