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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

#731

Post by alankay »

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #725
alankay wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tough question. (And always has been in a sense, because every era has had projects where the tool building has sunk the project into a black hole.) It really helped at Parc to work with real geniuses like Chuck Thacker and Dan Ingalls (and quite a few more). There is a very thin boundary between making the 2nd order work vs getting wiped out by the effort. Another perspective on this is to think about "not…

well, in this talk it sounds like you do advocate tool building - isn't tool building a way to try elliptic orbits instead of the circular ones ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs 'Power of simplicity'

Yes, I do advocate tool building -- basically "if you can do it without getting buried, you should".

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#732

Post by alankay1 »

corysama wrote: post #697
alankay1 wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the three best books you've read on teaching anything to kids? Let me know, and we'll start from there.

I am completely ignorant. So, it's going take a lot more than three books :) How about I blindly guess at my own answer and ask for alternatives? 1) Start with books like: How To Read A Book, Thinking Fast and Slow 2) Then, move on to books like: The Secret of Childhood, Instead of Education, Mindstorms 3) Then, you are ready for: Flow, The Children's Machine Thanks for coming back to answer more questions. If you've…

A big part of getting into reading is making choices of "this book, this time". And finding ways to do lots of reading (of pretty much anything ...)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#733

Post by alankay1 »

mmiller wrote: post #711
blihp wrote: post #702

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My example definitely presumed things like service discovery which gets you to URLs. But I think I see the larger point you make about what if you don't even know what kind services are available (which my example assumes you already know) and once told of their existence how do you negotiate their capabilities and usage (my example, as I envisioned it, completely falls apart here without some major plumbing which mi…

One thing I've found about the web, as it exists, is that the people who set up a system for the outside world to use change it over time. The URLs change. The CGI their service will accept changes. As things exist now, a program must use "sticky" names, and if a name changes, all of a sudden the connection is broken, even though the exact same functionality still exists. It would be good if a program could find the…

Hi Mark

Actually, this is not quite true about Smalltalk code (which is linked to its class). But referring to things is also done via variables and selectors of various kinds, and these are names which have to be locally known. Smalltalk can also find quite a few things by description (for example it can find things like the "sine function" via examples of inputs and outputs).

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#734

Post by alankay1 »

david927 wrote: post #701
alankay1 wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

few really good managers of researchers Bob Taylor has been generally praised as a great manager, and I believe them of course. But when I heard stories of his management style, it seemed to go against every instinct we have on how to foster creativity. Could you comment on that? Also, in terms of funding, I wonder -- haven't things changed? Wasn't funding more important in, say, the 1960's and 70's due to the cost o…

Tell me the stories, and I'll comment on them.

If you are computing on a $1000 computer, you are computing in the past. Part of the idea here is that you want to do research and development on supercomputers of the present that will give you the resources that will be available at lower prices in the future.

With salaries as they are today -- and real estate much worse -- it is actually more expensive to fund the same kinds of research today.

The past was similar to today in that most people in computing back then were orbiting around some local vendor's and local fads notions of computing. And it was a lot harder to make computers and other tools back then. It wasn't a crazy professor having an impact back then, but a whole research community that was required to make an impact.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#735

Post by alankay1 »

mathattack wrote: post #706
alankay1 wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our most unrealistic assumption was that when presented with really good ideas most people will most definitely learn and use them to make progress. In reality, only a tiny percentage can do this, and it is an enormous amount of work to deal with the norms.

Very insightful. There's a large gap between the intellectually curious early adopters and the majority in the middle. I just recall how long people were still auto-paying AOL when better options were available. :-) Thanks again!

And, early adopters will often adopt poor ideas -- they are mostly just early.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#736

Post by alankay1 »

ehudla wrote: post #712
alankay1 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents). And then there is the issue that we need to make "systems" ... I like what a function is, and this idea should be used, but I think it is better used rather differently ...

Are you familiar with Functional Reactive Programming (FRP)?

Sure ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#737

Post by alankay1 »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #713
alankay1 wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't dispute the figure, but in most cases when I say that phrase I'm trying to be hyperbolic to make a different point

Maybe we can talk about ways context should be changed? I still don't walk into a store with my phone and then quickly walk out with exactly those items I predetermined. Occasionally I will use my phone as a list, but a small piece of paper is easier to reference while in the store. I don't ever see anyone else doing any better and most never use their phone or any other device. I think this means that we do not yet…

Most of what is between most people's ears

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#738

Post by alankay1 »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #716
alankay1 wrote: post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really an engineer -- but yes music furnishes many good parallels and metaphors ...

Glad to hear it! I would certainly agree. [Do you prefer "[computer] science", "design", or another term? I personally get a bit queasy about calling it "science" when the field isn't centered around experiments and their analysis. Moreover "sciencing" is not a verb :).]

I like "computer science" when doing real "computer science". Science is making explanatory models from and about phenomena and looking for more phenomena.

Most of the time I think I'm "designing".

In English "sciencing" can be a verb. And there's the great line from "The Martian" -- "I'm going to have to science the shit out of this!"

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#739

Post by alankay1 »

kgr wrote: post #635
alankay1 wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you list something to read please?

https://github.com/foam-framework/foam/wiki https://github.com/foam-framework/foam/wiki/How-FOAM-is-Diff... https://github.com/foam-framework/foam/wiki/KeyConcepts http://foam-framework.github.io/foam/

Worth comparing to Dan Ingalls' Lively Kernel https://www.lively-kernel.org/

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#740

Post by mikekchar »

fchopin wrote: post #421

Hi, Alan! Like many here, I'm a big fan of what you've accomplished in life, and we all owe you a great debt for the great designs and features of technologies we use everyday! The majority of us have not accomplished as much in technology, and many of us, though a minority, are in the top end of the age bell curve. I'm in that top end. I've found over the years that I've gone from being frustrated with the churn of…

I'm a fair bit closer to the right hand side of the age curve than the left. My advice: Look at the brevity of Alan Kay's responses. When I was young I would have soared past them looking for the point. Now I see that one sentence and I weep. Why didn't anyone say that 20 years ago?

Maybe they did. I was too busy being frustrated with the churn of software development. All my time and energy was focused on new technologies that came out all the time. My young plastic brain spent it's flexibility absorbing the latest framework, etc.

Now that I have lost the motivation, ability and time to keep up with things like the younger folk, I can finally listen to the older folk (hopefully while there are still folk older than me to listen to).

These days I'm trying just to write code. All those young people have soared past the wisdom of their elders looking for the point. It's still there. Don't look at the new frameworks, look at what people were doing 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. How does it inform what you are doing?

I hope that helps! It's a struggle for me too.

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