What is your opinion on Operating Systems research and industry? I find the Linux monoculture tiresome.
See elsewhere in this AMA
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
581–590 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#582What is Alan Kay doing these days?
Too much typing into too small apertures!
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
Love, sweet love.
And ... ????
Better tools, where "better" is the most difficult to define, but simpler is a good direction.
I see equality in computing/storage/access as another great need, but teaching the world to write javascript isn't the solution, and "AI"s which do your shopping aren't either. I'm not sure where to place or how to phrase my imagined future, but the path there isn't a slow ascend (or decline, think "phoenix" - we're slowly approaching a locked in world). Maybe what we need is inspiration, a grand vision of the new world.
We also need to look up from our phones and teach our young to understand, see and act upon the world in greater time scales, unlearn our short-sighted perspectives and teach the next generation to care for their future generations, something we're failing to do.
Edit append: We also need culture (music, arts, etc.) to help us think.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#584Did you guys ever talk about Man-Computer Symbiosis in terms of the computer unfairly benefiting some men over other men? One example could be, give me money and I'll give you a computer that can translate English to Spanish. Another example could be, Apple share holders profit from iphone sales, and the iphone UI leads naive/normal people to think texting while driving is ok.
Books have the same problem, and both are fixable (lots easier than the big ones we should be tending to)
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#585Beside 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.)…
Would you consider the actor programming paradigm to be a good scalable model? It largely matches what I observe in both nature and where we seem to be headed with software engineering (containers in the cloud, near-trivial redundancy, stability, and scalability when properly designed). When I consider society I see a complex network of distributed actors, and when I consider my mind/brain I see the same. At this point in my philosophical development I am definitely resonating with the actor model, but I'm sure you are more familiar with this paradigm than I am - if not actors, where would you recommend searching?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#586You say the problem with Xerox is that they were only interested in billions (instead of trillions). Should we currently be interested in quadrillions, upper trillions, or, perhaps, larger? Once we become interested in an appropriately large number, what preparations should we be taking so that we can operate at that level? Do we just start putting product out there and collect the value on the open markets, or, do w…
That was a metaphorical hyperbole to attract the attention of people who think in terms of money rather than in "basic improvements to the world".
The idea is that "qualitatively changing the context in a powerful way" trivially creates enormous potential for everything (including making money).
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#587-- I was surprised that the HN list page didn't automatically refresh in my browser (seems as though it should be live and not have to be prompted ...)
HN feels old school. That's why I like it. (I'm considered a fossil by all of my 20, 30-something colleagues.)
How old are you? "Old school" to me is what could be done at Parc, etc. ... (hint: quite a bit more than on this website ...)
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#588Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smalltalk was an early attempt at non-command-messages to objects with the realization that you get a "programming language" if you take some care with the conventions used for composing the messages.
By non-command-messages do you mean that the receiver was free to ignore the message?
Yes
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#589Earlier quoted context omitted.
One start to this is not to do "a web browser" -- or other software -- with such bad initial conceptions (see elsewhere above). There was nothing necessary about this. We have a technology in which hacks are easy and can be really easily multiplied by the billions and sent everywhere. If we translate this into the world of medicine and disease and sanitation, what should we do? How far should we go? (But it is still…
I guess I'm thinking about this from the perspective of someone trying to make a computer for the general public. How will you convince anyone to buy and use a computer that can't browse the web? (And I doubt this is a problem that will go away with time; the web is big enough that it seems unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon.)
Yes, but what should the web actually be? And how can it be gotten there, etc.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#590Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
What is "data" without an interpreter (and when we send "data" somewhere, how can we send it so its meaning is preserved?)