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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

#401

Post by codinghorror »

alankay1 wrote: post #392
jensv wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe a Quora session.

A lot more good activity here than on Quora ...

Quora has some onerous policies, unfortunately: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/453958676529696769

HN is an excellent venue, but is necessarily text oriented, which is an OK tradeoff I think.

My next project after Stack Overflow, Discourse, is an 100% open source, flexible multimedia-friendly discussion system. It's GPL V2 on the code side, but we also tried to codify Creative Commons as the default license in every install, so discussion replies belong to the greater community: https://discourse.org

(Surprisingly, the default content licenses for most discussion software tend to be rather restrictive.)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#402

Post by alankay1 »

bbcbasic wrote: post #396
alankay1 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

> They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents). I am not sure what the time problem is for functional programming, but I reckon the Elm language/framework solves problems with time in a very elegant way with it's flavour of FRP and Signals. In Elm, you can play back your UI interactions in a debugger as they happened and watch the variables as they would have been!

Worth looking at Bob Balzer's EXDAMS system at Rand in the late 60s early 70s.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#403

Post by panic »

alankay wrote: post #242
discreteevent wrote: post #172

Hi Alan, A lot of the VPRI work involved inventing new languages (DSLs). The results were extremely impressive but there were some extremely impressive people inventing the languages. Do you think this is a practical approach for everyday programmers? You have also recommended before that there should be clear separation between meta model and model. Should there be something similar to discipline a codebase where pe…

Tricky question. One answer would be to ask whether there is an intrinsic difference between "computer science" and (say) physics? Or are the differences just that computing is where science was in the Middle Ages?

In physics, you can tell you're making progress because you can explain more things that happen in nature. How can you tell when you're making progress in computer science?

To me it seems like "computer science" lumps together too many different goals. It's like if we had a field called "word science" that covered story-writing, linguistics, scientific publication, typesetting, etc.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#404

Post by wslh »

philippeback wrote: post #370
wslh wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SqueakNOS? http://squeaknos.blogspot.com ;-) It has a native TCP/IP stack in Squeak.

http://pillarhub.pharocloud.com/hub/mikefilonov/pharonos

The difference is PharoNOS has a Linux running behind while the idea of SqueakNOS is to build a complete operating system via Squeak. In this way you can quickly hack it. There is a great page about these initiatives here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5727

BTW, prior to SqueakNOS we implemented this: http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/ (using Linux and modifying Squeak to work with SVGALib instead of X) in just 900mb inspired in QNX Demo Disk: http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#405

Post by alankay1 »

panic wrote: post #403
alankay wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tricky question. One answer would be to ask whether there is an intrinsic difference between "computer science" and (say) physics? Or are the differences just that computing is where science was in the Middle Ages?

In physics, you can tell you're making progress because you can explain more things that happen in nature. How can you tell when you're making progress in computer science? To me it seems like "computer science" lumps together too many different goals. It's like if we had a field called "word science" that covered story-writing, linguistics, scientific publication, typesetting, etc.

This is a terrific question, and I'll try to do it justice tomorrow morning.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#406

Post by jacquesm »

snowwrestler wrote: post #160

I recall reading an article about 10 years ago describing a PARC research project in which networked computers with antennae were placed throughout a set of rooms, and the subject carried a small transmitter with them from room to room. As the computer in each room detected the transmitter, it triggered actions in each room. I think it was called "ambient computing." Does this ring a bell for you? I have searched for…

Olivetti had a similar thing that was called 'activebadge'.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#407

Post by heurist »

jbrennan wrote: post #334
alankay wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tough one to try to produce "through the keyhole" of this very non-WYSIWYG poorly thought through artifact of the WWW people not understanding what either the Internet or computer media are all about. Let me just say that it's worth trying to understand what might be a "really good" balance between traditional oral culture learning and thinking, what literacy brings to the party, especially via mass media,…

>I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs.... This is the meta-thing that’s been bugging me: how do we help people realize they’re “missing their actual potential as thinkers”? The world seems so content to be an oral culture again, how do we convince / change / equip people to be skeptical of th…

Marijuana helped me realize there was a lot about myself I didn't understand and launched my investigation into more effective thought processes. I've become much more driven and thoughtful since I began smoking as an adult.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#408

Post by nealmydataorg »

danso wrote: post #281
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) *…

I teach SQL to my journalism students. Example exercise: http://2015.padjo.org/tutorials/sql-walks/exploring-wsj-medi... My main reason for teaching it was that it was a skill that helped me immensely as a journalist, in terms of being able to do data analysis. Because I learned it relatively late in my career, I thought it'd be hard for the students but most of them are able to get it. Even though I use relatively l…

What are the main factors which encourage (and are helpful) non-programmers to use SQL ?

We provide low code platform (SQL) to organize data and build custom applications as per specific workflow requirements. We are assuming that teaching/educating/training combined with lots of sample SQL code with real world examples are helpful to non-programmers for using SQL.

Sample SQL is available at https://mydataorganizer.com/MyDataOrganizer/QuarterDatesCalc...

Thanks, Neal

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#409

Post by mathattack »

alankay1 wrote: post #361

Hi Folks Thanks for all your questions, and my apologies to those I didn't answer. I got wiped out from 4:30 of answering (I should have taken some breaks). Now I have to. I will look at more of the questions tomorrow. Very best wishes Alan

Thank you very much for your time here. More importantly, thank you for your contribution to the field. All of us here live and work in a more exciting place because of the visions that you pursued and built. We are better for it.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#410

Post by callil »

alankay1 wrote: post #275
kens wrote: post #167

Looking at your 1972 Dynabook paper [1], would you make any changes to the Dynabook vision now? Also, what do you see as the biggest missing pieces (software or hardware) today? What current software gets closest to the vision? [1] Everyone should really take a look at the Dynabook paper: http://history-computer.com/Library/Kay72.pdf

There's a lot online and the Viewpoints "writings" page

link: http://vpri.org/html/writings.php - you can filter by author in the dropdown.
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