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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

#451

Post by MaulingMonkey »

quantumhobbit wrote: post #126
jjnoakes wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to do both in parallel and the first one done wins. That is, if I have a problem that requires a library or program, and I don't know of one, I semi-simultaneously try to find a library/program that exists out there (scanning forums, googling around, reading stack overflow, searching github, going to language repositories for the languages I care about, etc) and also in parallel try to formulate in my mind wha…

Yes. If it takes me longer to figure out how to use your library or framework than to just implement the functionality myself, there is no point in using the library. Some people claim you should still use the 3rd party solution because of the cost of supporting the extra code you have written. But bugs can exist in both my code and the 3rd party code and I understand how to fix bugs in my code much more easily.

Other points of consideration: My coworkers might not already know some library, but they definitely won't know my library. My coworker's code is just about as "3rd party" as any library - as is code I wrote as little as 6 months ago. Also my job owns that code, so rolling my own means I need to write another clone every time I switch employers - assuming there's no patents or overly litigious lawyers to worry about.

But you're of course correct that there is, eventually, a point where it no longer makes sense to use the library.

> Some people claim you should still use the 3rd party solution because of the cost of supporting the extra code you have written. But bugs can exist in both my code and the 3rd party code and I understand how to fix bugs in my code much more easily.

The problem is I got so tired of fixing bugs in coworker / former coworker code that I eventually replaced their stuff with off the shelf libraries, just so the bugs would go away. And in practice, they did go away. And it caught several usage bugs because the library had better sanity checks. And to this day, those former coworkers would use the same justifications, in total earnestness.

I've never said "gee, I wish we used some custom bespoke implementation for this". I'll wish a good implementation had been made commonly available as a reusable library, perhaps. But bespoke just means fewer eyes and fewer bugfixes.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#453

Post by dineshp2 »

Hi Alan!

From your comments, it's clear that you are not happy with the state of programming languages as it stands.

You mentioned that the current languages lack safe meta-definition and also that the next generation of languages should make us think better.

Apart from the above, could you mention more properties or features of programming languages, at a high level of course, that you consider should be part of the next generation of languages?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#454

Post by randomsearch »

alankay wrote: post #233
LeicesterCity wrote: post #101

Hi Alan, Previously you've mentioned the "Oxbridge approach" to reading, whereby--if my recollection is correct--you take four topics and delve into them as much as possible. Could you elaborate on this approach (I've searched the internet, couldn't find anything)? And do you think this structured approach has more benefits than, say, a non-structured approach of reading whatever of interest? Thanks for your time and…

There are more than 23,000,000 books in the Library of Congress, and a good reader might be able to read 23,000 books in a lifetime (I know just a few people who have read more). So we are contemplating a lifetime of reading in which we might touch 1/10th of 1% of the extent books. We would hope that most of the ones we aren't able to touch are not useful or good or etc. So I think we have to put something more than…

General question about this figure, which I've seen before:

> read 23,000 books in a lifetime

As a very conservative lower bound, a person who lives to the age of 80 would have to read 0.79 books per day, from the day they were born, to reach this figure.

Or, to put it another way, who has read 288+ books in the last year?

I'm quite sceptical about this figure. Any thoughts as to how this might be possible? Are the people Alan mentions speed-reading? Anyone else know similarly prolific readers?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#455

Post by astrobe_ »

alankay1 wrote: post #355
adamgravitis wrote: post #137

Hi Alan, I've heard you frequently compare the OOP paradigm to microbiology and molecules. It seems like even Smalltalk-like object interactions are very different from, say, protein-protein interactions. How do you think this current paradigm of message-sending could be improved upon to enable more powerful, perhaps protein-like composition?

Not proteins, but cell to cell (this is still an interesting mechanism to contemplate and develop ...

Do you believe in self-healing/self-repairing software?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#456

Post by patrec »

Hi Alan (and others!),

Logo is ~50 years old now, squeak 20 and olpc ~10. Do you know innovators who are now in their 20ies, 30ies and 40ies and who at least partly credit their mental development to childhood exposure to logo, e-toys, mindstorms, Turtle Geometry etc?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#457

Post by di4na »

randomsearch wrote: post #454
alankay wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more than 23,000,000 books in the Library of Congress, and a good reader might be able to read 23,000 books in a lifetime (I know just a few people who have read more). So we are contemplating a lifetime of reading in which we might touch 1/10th of 1% of the extent books. We would hope that most of the ones we aren't able to touch are not useful or good or etc. So I think we have to put something more than…

General question about this figure, which I've seen before: > read 23,000 books in a lifetime As a very conservative lower bound, a person who lives to the age of 80 would have to read 0.79 books per day, from the day they were born, to reach this figure. Or, to put it another way, who has read 288+ books in the last year? I'm quite sceptical about this figure. Any thoughts as to how this might be possible? Are the p…

AS someone that read at least one book per day if not more since the age of 6, yes it is possible. I can read between 100 to 200 page per hour, depending of the book.

You reach a storage and money problem fast (Ebook are a savior nowadays). And you tend to have multiple books open at the same time.

How does it work? There are several strategy. First i read fast. Experience and training make you read really fast. Secondly, you get a grasp of how things works and what the wirter has to say. In a fiction book, it is not unusual for me to not read a chapter or two because i know what will happen inside.

Finally... Good writers helps. Good writers make reading a breeze and are faster to read. They present ides in concise and efficient way, that follow the flow of thinking.

I will take more question gladly if you have some :)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#458

Post by calibraxis »

alankay wrote: post #130
di wrote: post #66

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…

Could someone give hints/pointers that help me understand the following? "parsing non-command messages in each process ... not a strong attempt to intertwine a real language around the message structures (this very same thing happened with http"

Does that mean the messages should have been part of a coherent protocol or spec? That there should have been some thought behind how messages compose into new messages?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#459

Post by fchopin »

patrec wrote: post #456

Hi Alan (and others!), Logo is ~50 years old now, squeak 20 and olpc ~10. Do you know innovators who are now in their 20ies, 30ies and 40ies and who at least partly credit their mental development to childhood exposure to logo, e-toys, mindstorms, Turtle Geometry etc?

I'm not someone that would be widely considered to be an innovator, but I had a few of the very first microcomputers that came out alone with some accompanying books of how to program them in BASIC, which was very important to the start of my career. The only free games I had early on were the ones I wrote myself, though it was only a few years before I was copying commercial games from others in an Apple II computer club. I also had the 1979 Big Trak- the real world version of logo; in fact if you were to attach a piece of sidewalk chalk to the back of it, it would be even more similar. I've often thought of getting the newer version for my daughter, even though it's not exactly the same: https://www.amazon.com/BBT-BIGTRAK-Big-Trak/dp/B0035IZ85G/

If you're looking for ideas for youth to get into programming, I've had the most success with Scratch: https://scratch.mit.edu/ , but I think Legos and Minecraft (or the free imitation, Exploration Lite)- things that you build with- are also important. Read "Jeff Bezos on the best gift he's ever received": http://www.marketplace.org/2014/12/08/business/jeff-bezos-be... And of course, getting kids into music is a great thing for creativity.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#460

Post by alankay »

a_c wrote: post #433
alankay wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My friend Neil Postman (our best media critic for many years) advocated teaching children to be "Guerilla Warriors" in the war of thousands of entities trying to seize their brains for food. Most children -- and most parents, most people -- do not even realize the extent to which this is not just aggressive, but regressive ...

Can you elaborate more on that?

Neil's idea was that all of us should become aware of the environments we live in and how our brain/minds are genetically disposed to accommodate to them without our being very aware of the process, and, most importantly, winding up almost completely unaware of what we've accommodated to by winding up at a "new normal".

The start of a better way is similar to the entry point of science "The world is not as it seems". Here, it's "As a human being I'm a collection of traits and behaviors, many of which are atavistic and even detrimental to my progress". Getting aware of how useful cravings for salt, fat, sugar, caffeine, etc., turn into a problem when these are abundant and consumer companies can load foods with them....

And, Neil points out -- in books like "Amusing Ourselves To Death" and "The End Of Childhood" -- we have cravings for "news" and "novelty" and "surprise" and even "blinking", etc. which consumer companies have loaded communications channels with ...

Many of these ideas trace back to McLuhan, Innis, Ong, etc.

Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.

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