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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

#591

Post by alankay1 »

panic wrote: post #531
alankay wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

The lack of science is because most people are not only not interested in science, but really don't understand what it is.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#592

Post by alankay1 »

heurist wrote: post #585
alankay1 wrote: post #529

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poi…

I have every reason to like Actors! But think about scaling for a while, ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#593

Post by nickpsecurity »

MustardTiger wrote: post #577
nickpsecurity wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's a list of alternatives I put together to see some capabilities or traits UNIX lacked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020 I think, usable day-to-day, I'd say you're down to Haiku, MorphOS, Genode, MINIX 3, and/or A2 Bluebottle. Haiku is a BeOS clone. MorphOS is one of last Amiga's that looks pretty awesome. Genode OS is a security-oriented, microkernel architecture that's using UNIX for bootstrapping…

Minix isn't bootstrapping on netbsd, the entire goal of the system is to be a microkernel based unix. It uses the netbsd userland because you don't need to rewrite an entire unix userland for no reason just to change kernels.

Mental slip on my part. Thanks for the correction. I stand by the example at least for the parts under NetBSD like drivers and reincarnation server. Their style is more like non-UNIX, microkernel systems of the past. Well, some precedent in HeliOS operating system but that was still detour from traditional UNIX.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_os

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#595

Post by phaedrus »

alankay1 wrote: post #291
edejong wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always felt that the meta space is too exponential or hyper to mentally represent or communicate. Perhaps we need different lenses to project the effects of the meta space on our mental model. Do you think this is why Gregor decided to move towards aspects?

I don't think Aspects is nearly as good an idea as MOP was. But the "hyperness" of it is why the language and the development system have to be much better. E.g. Dan Ingalls put a lot of work into the Smalltalks to allow them to safely be used in their own debugging, even very deep mechanisms. Even as he was making these breakthroughs back then, we were all aware there were further levels that were yet to be explored…

Aside from metaprogramming, from reading the "four reports" document that is the first Google link, it seems PIE also addresses another hard problem. In any hierarchically organized program, there are always related pieces of code that we would like to maintain together, but which get ripped apart and spread out because the hierarchy was split according to a different set of aspects. You can't get around this problem because if you change what criteria the hierarchy is split on in order to put these pieces near each other, now you've ripped apart code that was related on the original aspect. I've come to the conclusion that hierarchical code organization itself is the problem, and we would be better served by a way to assemble programs relationally (in the sense of an RDBMS). It seems like PIE was in that same conceptual space. Could you comment on that or elaborate more on the PIE system? Thanks.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#596

Post by kgr »

alankay1 wrote: post #268
Bystroushaak wrote: post #264

I have two questions: 1. It is known that you read a lot. Do you plan to write a book? You have been a big inspiration for me and I would love to read a book from you. 2. What is your opinion about Self programming language ( http://www.selflanguage.org )? I've read „STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming“ pdf and this feels related, especially to with the Klein interpreter ( http://kleinvm.sourceforge.net/ ).

I liked Self. "Good OOP" is still waiting for a much better notion to replace the idea of a "Class"

In FOAM (the Feature-Oriented Active Modeler) we replace classes with Models, which are just collections of Axioms. There are pre-built Axiom types for standard things like methods and properties, but also for things like imports, exports, traits, listeners, topics, templates, actions, inner-models/classes, etc. Axioms are themselves modeled, so you can create new types as required. In the end, you still end up with a class, but it's defined/built with an extensible composition of objects rather than by a more limited and static class definition.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4LbUv5FsGQ

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#597

Post by david927 »

alankay1 wrote: post #540
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?

Yes, of course; we agree. Let me refine my question:

In our not-quite-an-industry, we seem to laud attempts to optimize the artifact of a residual hack, and we are absolutely dismissive of attempts to rebuild the stack as being too ambitious. And the problem with being dismissive is that it's a judgement without trial. We have precious few "crazy professors" and no tolerance for them.

What can we do?

There's the 2020 group in San Francisco. Is that kind of meetup the right direction?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#598

Post by alankay1 »

phaedrus wrote: post #595
alankay1 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Aspects is nearly as good an idea as MOP was. But the "hyperness" of it is why the language and the development system have to be much better. E.g. Dan Ingalls put a lot of work into the Smalltalks to allow them to safely be used in their own debugging, even very deep mechanisms. Even as he was making these breakthroughs back then, we were all aware there were further levels that were yet to be explored…

Aside from metaprogramming, from reading the "four reports" document that is the first Google link, it seems PIE also addresses another hard problem. In any hierarchically organized program, there are always related pieces of code that we would like to maintain together, but which get ripped apart and spread out because the hierarchy was split according to a different set of aspects. You can't get around this problem…

Good insights -- and check out Alex Warth's "Worlds" paper on the Viewpoints site -- this goes beyond what PIE could do with "possible worlds" reasoning and computing ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#599

Post by melchebo »

alankay1 wrote: post #526
ksec wrote: post #449

What 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.

What do you think of their recent Swift Playground programming education effort ?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#600

Post by alankay1 »

kgr wrote: post #596
alankay1 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked Self. "Good OOP" is still waiting for a much better notion to replace the idea of a "Class"

In FOAM (the Feature-Oriented Active Modeler) we replace classes with Models, which are just collections of Axioms. There are pre-built Axiom types for standard things like methods and properties, but also for things like imports, exports, traits, listeners, topics, templates, actions, inner-models/classes, etc. Axioms are themselves modeled, so you can create new types as required. In the end, you still end up with…

Could you list something to read please?
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