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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

#531

Post by panic »

alankay wrote: post #482
alankay1 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 model…

Thanks for the answer! It seems like there's a distinction here between exploring how models can/should be built (a mathematical/philosophical task), helping people create and understand these models with computers (a design/engineering task), and using these models to formulate and test hypotheses about ourselves and the world (a scientific task). Maybe the lack of science is because we haven't figured out the math/philosophy/design/engineering parts yet!

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#532

Post by alankay1 »

olantonan wrote: post #447

No language today is able to improve itself like Smalltalk was able to. That's pretty sad, wouldn't you say?

Let's give Dan Ingalls the majority of the credit here. I will admit to "seeing" what was possible, but Dan was able to make really great compromises between what Should Be vs what would allow us to make great progress in the early 70s on relatively small machines (give Chuck Thacker the majority of the credit here for similar "art of the possible" with the Parc HW).

I liked the MOP book because they carried the model more deeply into the actual definitions -- I very much liked their metaphor that you want to supply a "region of design and implementation space" rather than a single point.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#533

Post by alankay1 »

stuque wrote: post #4

What language do you think we should teach first to computing major students these days? What about non-major students?

"There aren't any really good ones" -- so computing major students especially should have to learn 4 or 5 very different ones and write fairly major systems in them.

We should take another pass at design for both majors and non-majors ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#535

Post by alankay1 »

gbenegas wrote: post #185

Hi Alan, I'm a CS student thinking about graduate school. 1. Would you suggest going into a popular field that excites me but already has lot of brilliant students? (for example AI and ML) Or rather into a not-so-popular field where maybe I can be of more help? (for example computational biology) 2. If I had to choose between studying my current favorite field at an average research group, or another still interestin…

Please try to avoid too much planning for your future at this point and just try to get to a place where things are going on. Any good educational experience will take someone who is trying to get from A to B and instead get them to C (note that an under-educated person is not in a good position to make big choices -- so learn more!)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#536

Post by arloc »

Hi Alan,

Can you confirm that a message is a declarative information sent to a recipient which can (or can not) react to it? And what is your opinion about inheritance in OOP? Is it absolutely essential feature in an OOP language?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#537

Post by alankay1 »

smd4 wrote: post #44

Hi Alan - the innovation from PARC appears to be the result of a unique confluence of hardware, software, market forces, recent government research investment, and Michelangelo-level talent for bringing big ideas to fruition. Do you think that any factors that were significant back then are going to be difficult to reproduce now, as HARC gets started? Conversely are there novel aspects of today's environment that you…

Parc in the 70s was an outgrowth of the ARPA projects that were started to be set up in 1962. Bob Taylor was a factor for both, and wanted young researchers who already had imbibed the mother's milk of "the ARPA dream", This created a culture that never argued about what the general vision and goals were, and also was able to argue in good ways about how to get there.

Such a homogeneous culture organized around a particular vision doesn't exist today (that I know of), and it means that places like HARC will have to do some of the culture building that was done in the ARPA projects (I think of the HARC initiatives as being more like the ARPA projects than like Parc at this point)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#538

Post by alankay1 »

poppingtonic wrote: post #314

Alan, Thank you for doing this AMA! I would love to hear your thoughts on how to "train" "System 1", in order to make "System 2" more powerful. Not necessarily here, due to the time factor, but if you find some time to think more deeply on this, please let me know and we can think through this together.

This is a really interesting issue and one we should all be thinking about ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#540

Post by alankay1 »

david927 wrote: post #102

You have stated before that the computer revolution hasn't happened yet. It seems we stopped trying in earnest back in the early 1980's. Why? And what could be done to re-spark interest in moving forward? My gut feeling says that it would require a complete overhaul in almost every layer in the stack we use today and that there's reluctance to do that. Would you agree to some degree with that?

Have you seen the "gyre" in the Pacific?
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