Hi Alan,
Do current OO languages miss or unuse good ideas/features already invented ?
Is programming "with GUI only" a sensible for the future ?
GL
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
611–620 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#612Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ...
This is a very interesting paper. Its invocation of state space over time as a model of program side effects reminds me of an idea I had a couple years ago: if you think of a program as an entity in state-space where one dimension is time, then "private" object members in OO-programming and immutable values in functional programming are actually manifestations of the same underlying concept. Both are ways to create fences in the state-space-time of a program. Private members create fences along a "space" axis and functional programming creates fences along the "time" axis.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#613Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is "data" without an interpreter (and when we send "data" somewhere, how can we send it so its meaning is preserved?)
Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than criti…
Information in "entropy" sense is objective and meaningless. Meaning only exists within a context. If we think "data" represent information, "interpreters" bring us context and therefore meaning.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#614Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do get depressed -- how could one not? -- the trick with depression is to not allow it to take you into in-action. Re: Unix etc. try to imagine computer systems without "operating systems" as they are thought of today (hint: look at the Internet, etc.). The basic heuristic here is to avoid the "when you criticize something you are implicitly buying into it's very existence!". First try to see if there is anything w…
...and I'm not sure I agree. The idea that code from randoms shouldn't be put into critical infrastructure is certainly true. But the idea that people shouldn't tinker, hack on code, and learn, even if they end of with non-optimal, possibly broken code, is a dangerous one, because that's how people learn. And yes, they should dabble in important things. How else do they learn them. It's then our job, as the Real Worl…
It's not the learning process that is in question, but the ramifications of really extending the industrial revolution to distributing broken code.
(No language has ever been more set up to allow tinkering with everything for the purpose of learning than Smalltalk -- I think you probably realize this.)
I think most people would not recognize most exiting OSs in use by your definition in your second paragraph.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#615Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Bottom line: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century. Most children meet entertainment technology as early as before the first birthday, though. Many pre-teens that I see around possess smartphones and/or tablets. Most of the early teenagers possess multiple devices. None of these will be able to judge what's is beneficial to their future and well…
I once said that "Television is the last technology we should be allowed to invent without a Surgeon General's warning on it"
> Kay: children need to learn how to use the 21st century, or there's a good chance they will lose the 21st century.
> Gkya: I myself can't think of a future other than one full of device addicts, and a small bunch that managed to liberate themselves from perennial procrastination and pseudo-socialisation only in their twenties.
As a infovore this worries me. If we cannot control ourselves and come up with better solutions for self control then the authoritarian minded are likely to do it for us.
The Net is addictive and all those people pretending it ain't so are kidding themselves.
It's easy to imagine anti-Net campaigners in the same way as we see anti-globalization activists today.
I myself have seen the effects of good diet, exercise and meditation on a group of people, and it is quite remarkable how changed for the better people are. So there is hope!
I believe that social change, example: phubbing being widely regarded as taboo, isn't fast enough to keep with the Net's evolution. By the time a moral stance against phubbing is established mobile phones probably won't exist. For this I think we need a technological solution which is as adaptive as an immune system, but also one which people can opt in to. Otherwise eventually people will demand governments do things like turn off the Net at certain times during the day or ban email after 6pm and so on.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#616Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than criti…
There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were. The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For important negotiations we don't send telegrams, we send ambassadors. This is what objects are all about, and it continues to be amazing to me that the real necessities and practical necessities…
I think object is a very powerful idea to wrap "local" context. But in a network (communication) environment, it is still challenging to handle "remote" context with object. That is why we have APIs and serialization/deserialization overhead.
In the ideal homogeneous world of smalltalk, it is a less issue. But if you want a Windows machine to talk to a Unix, the remote context becomes an issue.
In principle we can send a Windows VM along with the message from Windows and a Unix VM (docker?) with a message from Unix, if that is a solution.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#617-- 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 ...)
Imagine: 1. trying to read something long, or 2. going off to a follow a link and to come back and respond, only to find that the page has been refreshing while you looked away. Now you have to scroll about to find the place you were at in order to respond or to continue reading the comments.
This is the way Facebook is now... Not an improvement. It's not designed for following threads, and it looks like they don't care.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#618Earlier quoted context omitted.
http://pillarhub.pharocloud.com/hub/mikefilonov/pharonos
The difference is PharoNOS has a Linux running behind while the idea of SqueakNOS is to build a complete operating system via Squeak. In this way you can quickly hack it. There is a great page about these initiatives here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5727 BTW, prior to SqueakNOS we implemented this: http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/ (using Linux and modifying Squeak to work with SVGALib instead of X) in just…
I was going to mention QNX Demo Disk in my UNIX alternatives comment. I think I edited it out for a weak fit to the post. It was an amazing demo, though, showing what a clean-slate, alternative, RTOS architecture could do for a desktop experience. The lack of lag in many user-facing operations was by itself a significant experience. Showed that all the freezes and huge slow-downs that were "to be expected" on normal OS's weren't necessary at all. Just bad design.
It's neat that it was the thing that inspired one of your Squeak projects. Is SqueakNOS usable day-to-day in any console desktop or server appliance context? Key stuff reliable yet?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#619Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than criti…
There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were. The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For important negotiations we don't send telegrams, we send ambassadors. This is what objects are all about, and it continues to be amazing to me that the real necessities and practical necessities…
[deleted]
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#620Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
"Cops need criminals"
"Doctors need disease"
Things have happened in the past when passionate and confident people with chops have decided to do something. These have not always correlated with "What is actually needed" (often not) but they usually get things into a state where people who are mainly trying to advance their own goals see some advantage (including "tech chic").
We are certainly not in a position where this can't happen a few more times.
Looking back, I've been struck not by how few really good researchers there are, but more so by how few really good managers of researchers there have been, and even more so by how really really few good funders there have been.
Maybe too simplistic, but in my view great funding has caused great stuff. So the funders should get the gold medals rather than the researchers! (Think about it: the good funders give out the gold in advance knowing full well that if even if they are very luckly 70% of the gold will turn to lead in just a few years!)