What are the first 3 books I should read on the topic of teaching tech to kids? Thanks!
What are the three best books you've read on teaching anything to kids? Let me know, and we'll start from there.
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
521–530 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you believe in self-healing/self-repairing software?
This is a worthy goal, and I think quite possible. Note that Biology requires a lot of organization in order to do this, so it is likely not to be straightforward from where we are. But we had to make the Internet -- etc. -- self-healing in many respects (we had to go to dynamic stabilities rather than trying to make perfect machines ...)
Do you think that genetic programming and machine learning are effective avenues to pursue regarding this? Or is that introducing unnecessary complexity in many/most cases?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#523Hi Alan, I am sometimes involved with mentoring younger people with STEM projects (arduino etc). Its all the buzz. But I heard one of my younger relatives lament about the tendency of young people to gravitate towards a quantitative field of study / training - is there too much hype?. "Learning to Code" is a general movement that is helping many youth to improve their career prospects. Do you think it's being effecti…
It's a big problem along many dimensions. A good start is to try to get a handle on what you think should be required. One hint is to forget about vocational goals and focus on "adults as real citizens in a large diverse society"
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#524Is there any site that lists all arguments from all sides and reach a conclusion? If they don't reach a conclusion, do they have an issue tracking system and leave the issue open for anyone to find easily and respond? Debates should have a programming language, have CI for new arguments, have unit tests to check logic, have issues tracked and collaborated on GitHub.
The problems with most arguments is that they arguers assume they are in a valid context (this is usually not the case, and this is the central problem of "being rational"). Another way to look at it is "Forget about trying to win an argument -- use argumentation to try to understand the issues better and from more perspectives ..."
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#525Hi Alan. A lot has been made of the visions that your colleagues and you had that ultimately became the fabric of our industry. Did you have any ideas, predictions or visions which ultimately didn't play out? (And any ideas on why?) Thank you very much to your contributions to our industry. Anyone blessed to be working in this field today owes you an enormous debt of gratitude. You have made a dent in the universe.
Our most unrealistic assumption was that when presented with really good ideas most people will most definitely learn and use them to make progress. In reality, only a tiny percentage can do this, and it is an enormous amount of work to deal with the norms.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#526What do you think of Steve Jobs? And the Current Apple. Do you have any meaning friendship with him? Do you miss him? Any Story to share?
Steve was not the kind of person to have friends, but he and I were "pretty friendly" right up until his death -- this is partly because our lives intertwined closely a few times -- not just for Apple, but also for Pixar, and then later as I tried to get him back to real education as an Apple goal.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#527What do you think of Chris Crawford's work on Interactive Storytelling? His latest iteration is "Siboot" http://siboot.org/ Note: He mentions being inspired for that from discussions with you at Atari.
Chris was fun to work with!
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#528Hi 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?
Data like that sentence? Or all of the other sentences in this chat? I find 'data' hard to consider a bad idea in and of itself, i.e. if data == information, records of things known/uttered at a point in time. Could you talk more about data being a bad idea?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#529Beside objects one true revolutionary idea in Smalltalk is the uniformity of meta facilities - an object knowing about itself and being able to tell you. I see so many dev resources burnt just because people build boring UIs or persistence bindings by wiring MANUALLY in traditional languages. All this is a no-brainer when enough meta infos (objects and relations) are available and a program is reflected as data as in…
I think one of the biggest blindnesses of our field is scaling (and I'm not sure quite why). This leads to an enormous amount of effort at roughly the same scales of some good ideas decades ago. (I think my background in molecular biology -- which continues to a very small extent -- helped this a lot. At some point one has to grapple with what is more or less going on and why it more or less works so amazingly well.)
What would a programming language be like if we actually took the many dimensions of scaling seriously ... ?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#530Hi Alan, Do you think we're yet at a position where we could catalog a set of "primitives" that are foundational to programming systems? (Where "systems" are fundamentally distributed and independent of software platform, programming language or hardware implementation)
Sure.