Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does the world actually need?
Love, sweet love.
And ... ????
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
511–520 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't the answer contained in the quote? Do a cost/benefit analysis of the "amount of time and energy" that would go "down these ratholes" versus the "the time not wasted in trying to fix other people’s not quite right tools."
But how can you assess this until you have gone down those rat holes?
Having gone down several myself, I can say it's hard. You lose time. You have to accept you've lost time and learn how not to do it in the future.
My advice is to collaborate with people who are much, much smarter than you and have the expectation that things actually get done because they know they could do it. You learn what productivity looks like first, at the most difficult and complex level you're capable of.
That sets the bar.
Everything has to be equal to or beneath that unless your experience tells you you'll be able to do something even greater (possibly) with the right help or inspiration
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#513You 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?
I'm not Alan, but I saw one of his talks[1] about how they did invent all those things we're using now, which you are very much referring to. What he said was important was to have a big horizon, at least 10 years. Anything less would not do. Then envision what should be possible in that time. "It would be ridiculous if $X wasn't possible in $Y years" and then backtrack on what would technically be required to make t…
10 years is too close -- 30 years out will generally lose the pernicious connection to the present and "how do we get there?". The idea is to "go out there and bring the ideas back" rather than try to go from the present to the future.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
For many particular examples, there have already been enough rathole spelunkers to provide useful data. Maybe start looking in the places where there isn't already useful data?
Any area in which enough such spelunkers are found is unlikely to be significantly improved by adding your own effort.
Agreed. It's often much, much harder to articulate why an idea is bad or a rat hole. You just move on.
I've come up with explanation by analogy. You can demonstrate quite easily in mathematics how you can create a system of notation or a function that quickly becomes impossible to compute. A number that is too large, or an algorithm that would take infinity amount of time and resources to solve...
It seems to be in nature that bad ideas are easy. Good ideas are harder, because they tend to be refinements of what already exists and what is already good.
So pursue good ideas. Pursue the thing that you have thought about and decided has the best balance between values and highest chance to succeed. Sometimes it's just a strong gut feeling. Go for it, but set limits, because you don't want to fall prey to a gut feeling originating from strong intuition but an equally strong lack of fundamental understanding.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#515Hey Alan, You seem very disapointed and upset with the way computing has gone in the last decade. Speaking as a younger (15) and more satisfied (I still think the UNIX abstraction is pretty solid, despite what others may say) programmer, how do you not get depressed about the way technology is going? Also, what do you propose to eliminate the "re-inventing the flat tire" problem? Should every programmer be forced thr…
I do get depressed -- how could one not? -- the trick with depression is to not allow it to take you into in-action.
Re: Unix etc. try to imagine computer systems without "operating systems" as they are thought of today (hint: look at the Internet, etc.).
The basic heuristic here is to avoid the "when you criticize something you are implicitly buying into it's very existence!". First try to see if there is anything worth existing! (OSs are not necessary ...)
How long does it take to learn real science? And shouldn't computer science be a real science?
Another way to look at this is that anyone could be a doctor until recently (really recently!) because no one knew what was going on. And a lot of damage was done (and is still being done.) Once some real knowledge is obtained, we can't afford to have random practitioners dabbling into important things. (The idea that this might be OK is another pop culture delusion and desire ...)
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#516Hi Alan, I watched an OOPSLA talk where you described how tapes were used when you were in the air force. The tape readers were simple because they stupidly followed instructions on the tapes themselves to access the data. You seemed to like this arrangement better than what we have with web browsers and html, where the browser is assumed to know everything about the format. One way to interpret this is that we shoul…
This is a perfect example of "systems blindness" in the face of real scaling.
What should a browser actually know in order to scale (and why didn't the browser folks realize this? (rhetorical question) -- this knowledge was already well around by the early 90s).
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#517Hi Alan! I've got some assumptions regarding the upcoming big paradigm shift (and I believe it will happen sooner than later): 1. focus on data processing rather than imperative way of thinking (esp. functional programming) 2. abstraction over parallelism and distributed systems 3. interactive collaboration between developers 4. development accessible to a much broader audience, especially to domain experts, without…
What if "data" is a really bad idea?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that the "training" of "System 1" is a key factor in allowing "System 2" to be powerful. This is beyond the scope of this AMA (or at least beyond my scope to try to put together a decent comment on this today).
There's a recursive sense in which "training" "System 1" involves assimilating more abstractions, through practice and spaced repetition, such as deferring to the equations of motion when thinking about what happens when one throws a ball in the air. Going as far as providing useful interfaces to otherwise difficult cognitive terrain (a la Mathematica) is still part of this subproject. The process of assimilating new…
Personally, I've found that discovering "hazy" intuitive connections between otherwise dissonant subjects/ideas (such as the mentioned physics example) cements new concepts at a System 1 level quickly if done early in the learning process. It's also surprising how far one can go on such noisy assimilations alone as well, before needing to dig deeper.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#519Hi Alan, We know you are not a big fan of web. Regardless how we got here, what is your view on how we should address the real world decentralization problems in the context of http://www.decentralizedweb.net/ ?
One of several major mistakes with the web has to do with thinking that the browser is some kind of application "with features" -- if you think of the actual scale of the Internet (and they didn't) you realize that at the very least, the browser, etc, has to be more like an operating system, and with as few features as possible: really to safely run encapsulated modules and deal out resources. It is crazy that after…
Thanks for the insight.
In your point of view, on top of the current hardware infrastructure, how do we build a decentralized network operating system (contrary to the old centralized timesharing system)?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#520Hi Alan, Since you may spend another day answering questions.. a got some more for you :-) What do you think about the different paradigms in programming? And what do you think about type theory, etc? Bonus question: I am trying to develop a new general programming system for children. I was inspired by Smalltalk and ELM. http://www.reddit.com/r/unseen_programming It is a graphical system that uses function blocks co…
A good heuristic for designing programming languages is to try to take the largest most complicated kinds of things you want to do, work them out, and then see if there is a "language lurking".
Most people make the big mistake of lovingly making small neat examples that are easy to learn -- these often don't scale at all well. E.g. "data" in the small "seems natural" but the whole idea scales terribly. And so forth for most of the favorite paradigms around today.