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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

#481

Post by mmiller »

logicallee wrote: post #50

1. What do you wish someone would ask you so that you could finally share your thoughts, but nobody has broached as a subject? 2. (This question is about interactive coding, as a dialogue). Human dialogs (conversations) are interactive. I think in the past computers were limited, and computer languages had to be very small (as compared with any human language + culture) so that a programmer could learn what the compu…

What you ask here is very interesting to me, because some time back I got to thinking about what Alan Kay talked about with trying to negotiate meaning, in reference to using Licklider's concept of "communicating with aliens." Kay (IIRC) used a simpler concept of trying to order a burrito from a vendor, where neither the vendor nor the customer understand each other's language. He said by using gestures, you can get the idea across, because you can reference common concepts in each other's heads, and finally come to agreement about ordering a burrito. So, I started on a "sketch" for a language for a fairly simple task (converting between encoding schemes) where the code was suggestive, rather than prescriptive, and it just used a declarative style. One example is I just said, "a5 b6 10..." (including the double-quotes, and the trailing "...") to try to suggest a string containing a sequence of hex numbers of indeterminate length. I was saying, "Expect this type of information." As I did this, and thought about what else the language would need to express, I came to the exact same question you did, "There could be a variety of interpretations of this. Maybe the dev. environment should ask the programmer questions, 'Did you mean...?'" The programmer could respond in some way meaning "Yes" or "No." If no, the dev. environment could ask about other possible meanings it knows about, based on the syntax used. I could see this getting complicated very quickly, because what I hoped for was that the language would give a programmer the freedom to try expressions that made sense to them, in hopes that the language environment with which the programmer communicated would understand them, and that the language environment should try as "hard" as it could to understand them. However, not being skilled in AI, I wondered if the forms of expression I was thinking about were constrained enough in meaning that I could completely code a scheme whereby, looking at syntax "signals" in the code, it could reason through the expressions to make good guesses about their meaning, and then test them by formulating intelligible questions about them to confirm what the programmer was getting at. Going through that exercise told me I had a lot to ponder, learn, and explore with this idea, because I didn't come up with any ready answers that felt satisfactory. The best I could come up with was that I would code the language to allow a few possibilities with the syntax "signals," in combination with other "signals" that I could anticipate, but if the expression went beyond the coded meanings, I'd have to have the language say, "I don't understand what you're talking about. Please try expressing it differently," which would lead to a kind of guessing game between the programmer and the language, with the programmer quickly getting the idea, "There have got to be some rules to this system. Why don't I just look at its programming, and figure out how I use its rules to express what I want," which would defeat what I was going after. The whole thing would be an artifice, rather like an Eliza simulation.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#482

Post by alankay »

alankay1 wrote: post #405
panic wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now that it is "morning", I'm not sure that I can do justice to this question here...

But certainly we have to take back the term "computer science" and try to give it real meaning as to what might constitute an actual science here. As Herb Simon pointed out, it's a "science of the artificial", meaning that it is a study of what can be made and what has been made.

Science tries to understand phenomena by making models and assessing their powers. Nature provides phenomena, but so do engineers e.g. by making a bridge in any way they can. Like most things in early engineering, bridge-lore was put in "cookbooks of practice". After science got invented, scientist-engineers could use existing bridges as phenomena to be studied, and now develop models/theories of bridges. This got very powerful rather recently (the Tacoma Narrows bridge went down just a few months after I was born!).

When the first Turing Award winner -- Al Perlis -- was asked in the 60s "What is Computer Science?", he said "It is the science of processes!". He meant all processes including those on computers, but also in Biology, society, etc.

His idea was that computing formed a wonderful facility for making better models of pretty much everything, especially dynamic things (which everything actually is), and that it was also the kind of thing that could really be understood much better by using it to make models of itself.

Today, we could still take this as a starting place for "getting 'Computer Science' back from where it was banished".

In any case, this point of view is very different from engineering. A fun thing in any "science of the artificial" is that you have to make artifacts for both phenomena and models.

(And just to confuse things here, note how much engineering practice is really required to make a good theory in a science!)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#483

Post by alankay1 »

elcritch wrote: post #438
alankay1 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you start with "desirable process" you can eventually work your way back to the power plug in the wall. If you start with something already plugged in, you might miss a lot of truly desirable processes. Part of working your way back to reality can often require new hardware to be made or -- in the case of the days of microcode -- to shape the hardware. There are lots of things vendors could do. For example: Intel…

Have you looked into the various Haskell/OCaml to hardware translators people have been coming up with the past few years? It seems like it's been growing and several FPGA's are near that PnP status. In particular the notion of developing compile time proved RTS using continuation passing would be sweet. Even with newer hardware it seems we're still stuck in either dynamic mutable languages or functional static ones.…

Without commenting on Haskell, et al., I think it's important to start with "good models of processes" and let these interact with the best we can do with regard to languages and hardware in the light of these good models.

I don't think the "stuckness" in languages is other than like other kinds of human "stuckness" that come from being so close that it's hard to think of any other kinds of things.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#484

Post by villanelle »

alankay wrote: post #478
datashovel wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What steps would a group of people (civilization?) need to take in order to make progress here? When choices are abundant, the masses have been enabled, and yet knowledge is still at a premium?

All cultures have a lot of knowledge -- the bigger influences are contextual and epistemological (i.e. "points of view" and "stance", and "what is valued", etc.) Self-awareness of what we are ("from Mars") is the essential step, and it's what real education needs to be about.

What does "from Mars" mean here?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#485

Post by mischief01 »

It is not unlikely that you will never get to the same league as 'the inventors'.

Most people are mediocre at everything they do and will always be. Most likely that includes you. We live in a culture that doesn't just tell everyone that they can easily outgrow mediocrity, no, this culture tells people they are above it from the very start.

The following advice doesn't apply to geniuses or those who can be, but it applies to the majority who will read this:

The best you can do is look back on your life and see if there is only mediocrity. If there is, you have to be honest with yourself and recognize if it's so because of factors that you can still change, or not. For most people reading this the latter will be the case, which means you simply have to live with it and stop trying to influence the world, because everything you end up doing is going to make things worse (for you, and everyone else).

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#487

Post by _pfxa »

alankay wrote: post #460
a_c wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".…

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

Most children meet entertainment technology as early as before the first birthday, though. Many pre-teens that I see around possess smartphones and/or tablets. Most of the early teenagers possess multiple devices. None of these will be able to judge what's is beneficial to their future and well-being, and opt for it rather than what is immediately fun and pleasing. Just like most of them will live on chocolate bars and crisps if let to do so. The burden falls on the parents, a burden they don't take.

I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties. And while my country can prohibit certain products (food, etc.) from import and production within its own borders (e.g. genetically modified, chemically engineered to be consumed greedily), this can't be done with websites, because (a) it's technically impossible and (b) it 'contradicts freedom of speech'. I'll ask the reader to philosophise over (b), because neither the founding fathers of the US nor the pioneers of the french revolution, nor most of the libertarian, freedom-bringing revolutionists had a Facebook to tag their friends' faces.

(edit: I don't want to get into a debate over freedom of speech, and don't support any form of cencuring of it, tho I don't want freedom of speech at the cost of exploitation of generations and generations by some companies that use it as a shelter for themselves.)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#488

Post by alankay »

villanelle wrote: post #484
alankay wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All cultures have a lot of knowledge -- the bigger influences are contextual and epistemological (i.e. "points of view" and "stance", and "what is valued", etc.) Self-awareness of what we are ("from Mars") is the essential step, and it's what real education needs to be about.

What does "from Mars" mean here?

It means "outside our human prejudices about ourselves". As though we actually were a valid object of real science....

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#489

Post by alankay »

_pfxa wrote: post #487
alankay wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".…

> Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century. Most children meet entertainment technology as early as before the first birthday, though. Many pre-teens that I see around possess smartphones and/or tablets. Most of the early teenagers possess multiple devices. None of these will be able to judge what's is beneficial to their future and well…

I once said that "Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent without a Surgeon General's warning on it"

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#490

Post by pdog »

alankay1 wrote: post #342
pdog wrote: post #94

Alan, Computers have been a part of education in the United States for several decades, but you've argued that technology isn't used to its full potential. 1. Why has technology in schools failed to make an impact? 2. How would you design a curriculum for your children that uses technology effectively today?

I've written and talked a lot on these subjects, so let me suggest you look at the Viewpoints website, YouTube, there's a TED talk, etc.

Check out Points of View: http://vpri.org/pov/
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