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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

#781

Post by alankay »

DigitalJack wrote: post #778
alankay wrote: post #622

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...

It's hard for me to grasp what this negotiation would look like. Particularly with objects that haven't encountered each other. It just seems like such a huge problem. I don't really know anything at all about microbiology, but maybe climbing the ladder of abstraction to small insects like ants. There is clearly negotiation and communication happening there, but I have to think it's pretty well bounded. Even if one a…

It is worth thinking of an analogy to TCP/IP -- what is the smallest thing that could be universal that will allow everything else to happen?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#783

Post by alankay1 »

fogus wrote: post #779
alankay1 wrote: post #741

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots ... Molecular Biology of the Cell Notes on a Synthesis of Form etc

I for one would love to see the 'etc' expanded, but in any case I do appreciate you taking the time to respond. Thanks!

There is a very old reading list online I made for the company that is now Accenture -- and this was the subject of a recent HN "gig". I think there is a URL for this discussion in this AMA.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#785

Post by david927 »

alankay1 wrote: post #734
david927 wrote: post #701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sam…

The stories I know came from Dealers of Lightning and what I remember (correctly I hope) is that the weekly meetings were quite contentious and that he would even encourage haranguing the presenter. Is that true? Did the people there feel it as healthy constructive criticism? I would worry that this would more likely stifle creative thought than encourage it.

If you are computing on a $1000 computer, you are computing in the past.

I know that this was true in the past but it's my contention that hardware has had Moore's Law where software has stagnated, and that the passing of time has meant that now current software doesn't often take full advantage of the hardware available. If you did architect based on where the puck is going (optimized for multi-core, no main memory) current hardware wouldn't slow you down the same way as it did before and sometimes you would even see a performance gain.

By the way, thanks for doing this.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#786

Post by saiko-chriskun »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #301
alankay1 wrote: post #12

-- 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 ...)

Legend is, this forum runs on an abandoned LISP implementation. Most things around here are not how they should seem.

Yep- arclanguage.org.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#787

Post by alankay »

ontouchstart wrote: post #784
alankay wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their larger goals are important.

Do you think they are on the right path to their larger goals?

I think for so many important cases, this is almost the only way to do it. The problems were caused by short-sighted vendors and programmers getting locked into particular computers and OS software.

For contrast, one could look at a much more compact way to do this that -- with more foresight -- was used at Parc, not just for the future, but to deal gracefully with the many kinds of computers we designed and built there.

Elsewhere in this AMA I mentioned an example of this: a resurrected Smalltalk image from 1978 (off a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) that was quite easy to bring back to life because it was already virtualized "for eternity").

This is another example of "trying to think about scaling" -- in this case temporally -- when building systems ....

The idea was that you could make a universal computer in software that would be smaller than almost any media made in it, so ...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#788

Post by aleh »

ehmorris wrote: post #709
mischief01 wrote: post #485

It is not unlikely that you will never get to the same league as 'the inventors'. Most people are mediocre at everything they do and will always be. Most likely that includes you. We live in a culture that doesn't just tell everyone that they can easily outgrow mediocrity, no, this culture tells people they are above it from the very start. The following advice doesn't apply to geniuses or those who can be, but it ap…

This comment is so annoying - the perfect HN mix of pretentious and nihilist. If you really think that average people trying to create anything will make things worse, then you're probably fine with the entertainment-addiction cycle in the first place. Maybe you work for supercell.

I believe this comment is not directed to people who are trying to create something, but to people who feel entitled/special because they are trying to create something they perceive as improvement for humanity.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#789

Post by alankay1 »

david927 wrote: post #785
alankay1 wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sam…

The stories I know came from Dealers of Lightning and what I remember (correctly I hope) is that the weekly meetings were quite contentious and that he would even encourage haranguing the presenter. Is that true? Did the people there feel it as healthy constructive criticism? I would worry that this would more likely stifle creative thought than encourage it. If you are computing on a $1000 computer, you are computin…

The research community was "an arguing community", and knew how to argue "in good ways" (i.e. no personal attacks, only trying to illuminate the issues, etc.) This worked pretty well almost always ... (The weekly meetings were not for being creative, but for discussion ...)

Let me respectfully disagree with your contention. The point that is missed is not what the hardware could do, but what can you do without optimizing. It is very very hard to put on the optimization hat without removing the design hat, and once you've removed the latter you are lost.

The key to the Parc approach was to be able to do many experiments in the future without having to optimize. (There was a second part to this "key" but I'll omit it here)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#790

Post by DigitalJack »

alankay1 wrote: post #780
DigitalJack wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need to read what you've said regarding simulations and pseudotime, but I've been wondering if this is along the same lines has as an HDL like VHDL/Verilog/SystemVerilog. I do chip implementations in those languages, which of course involves simulation and a time concept. I get the idea that is not the sort of simulation you mean, but I'm not sure. The other thought I had was simulation more in the SPICE sense that…

What would a simulation of an epidemic look like? Or a simulation of ants finding food via pheromone trails. Or simulation of dye diffusing in water? Or a simulation of an object being dropped? Etc

Cellular automata comes to mind. I'll think on it.

This AMA has really been neat, thanks so much for doing it.

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