561–570 of 931 posts
Hi Alan, What skills would your (hypothetical?) apprentice need to have? If this were more like a partnership what would be the subject to work on? For that matter, what are you working on now?
Do you think artificial human languages designed with strong logical rules (Lojban..) can be succesful? Do you think they can act in a-la Newspeak(the 1984 Newspeak) way?
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SQL is declarative. Compare: for user in table_users: if user.is_active: return user.first_name; vs: SELECT first_name FROM users_table WHERE is_active It's unfortunate that the order of the clauses in SQL is "wrong" (e.g. you should say FROM, WHERE, SELECT: Define the universe of relevant data, filter it down, select what you care about), but it's still quite easy to wrap your mind around. You are asking the compute…
To play devil's advocate Prolog is considered much more similar to SQL than any other language and I suspect that will have an extremely high learning cost. That may be me being biased due to learning procedural languages first. At the same time I consider myself well versed in SQL.
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Or less -- I think UIs have really gone downhill. But, it's also worth looking at places where there's been enough change of one kind or another to constitute "qualitative". This has certainly happened in many areas of engineering and in science. How about in computering?
Can you explain more about what in UIs you think has gone downhill? I've seen you refer to this idea in quite a few of your comments and it would be great to get insight on what aspects you think need improving/exterminating/rethinking.
But let's see -- how about UIs giving up on UNDO, not allowing or not showing multiple tasks, not having good ways to teach how to us the UI or the apps, ...
And a zillion more ...
Yikes!
Thanks!
What other interests do you have that are not technology related. For example what kind of music do you like? Do you like art?
As a community, we often think on quite short time-scales ("What can we build right now, for users right now, to make money asap?"). I feel like you've always been good at stepping back, and taking a longer view. So what should a designer or a developer be doing now, to make things better in 10 years, or 100 years?
What does the world actually need?
It seems like a cheap answer, but it needs more people, with more perspectives, trying out various answers to this question.
I suspect the greatest long-term leverage comes from providing people relief from the cognitive load of fighting for food, shelter, health, transportation, and education.
Those are heavy goals that lots of people have spent lots of time shifting only very slowly. The little-Alan-Kay-in-my-mind replies, "We need better thinking-tools in order to do it faster", which I can half-believe, but beyond that, I get stuck. I don't see how to work backwards from that to a first step that can actually be taken.
Hi Alan, I'm a CS PhD student at Caltech. What advice do you have for young computer scientists, especially for PhD students?
In terms of real, in use, user interfaces, what do you think are the best examples? What do you like about them?
Hi Alan, What is your view on Literate Programming and why it hasn't taken off (yet)?