Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
791–800 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#792Earlier quoted context omitted.
SQL is declarative. Compare: for user in table_users: if user.is_active: return user.first_name; vs: SELECT first_name FROM users_table WHERE is_active It's unfortunate that the order of the clauses in SQL is "wrong" (e.g. you should say FROM, WHERE, SELECT: Define the universe of relevant data, filter it down, select what you care about), but it's still quite easy to wrap your mind around. You are asking the compute…
Along this point, C# and VB.NET have SQL-like expressions that can be used for processing, called LINQ [1]. They even get the order of the clauses correct! A feature like this may help your programmers who are used to thinking in terms of filter -> select -> order. [1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397927.aspx
Ecto (Elixir) does the from-in-where syntax as well.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#793Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I agree that the "image" idea is more powerful than the "data" idea.
However since PC revolution, the mainstream seemed to take on the "data" path for whatever technical or non-technical reasons.
How do you envision the "coming back" of image path via either bypassing the data path or merging with it in a not so faraway future?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#794Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 th…
I agree that the "image" idea is more powerful than the "data" idea. However since PC revolution, the mainstream seemed to take on the "data" path for whatever technical or non-technical reasons. How do you envision the "coming back" of image path via either bypassing the data path or merging with it in a not so faraway future?
Over all of history, there is no accounting for what "the mainstream" decides to believe and do. Many people (wrongly) think that "Darwinian processes" optimize, but any biologist will point out that they only "tend to fit to the environment". So if your environment is weak or uninteresting ...
This also obtains for "thinking" and it took a long time for humans to even imagine thinking processes that could be stronger than cultural ones.
We've only had them for a few hundred years (with a few interesting blips in the past), and they are most definitely not "mainstream".
Good ideas usually take a while to have and to develop -- so the when the mainstream has a big enough disaster to make it think about change rather than more epicycles, it will still not allocate enough time for a really good change.
At Parc, the inventions that made it out pretty unscathed were the ones for which there was really no alternative and/or no one was already doing: Ethernet, GUI, parts of the Internet, Laser Printer, etc.
The programming ideas on the other hand were -- I'll claim -- quite a bit better, but (a) most people thought they already knew how to program and (b) Intel, Motorola thought they already knew how to design CPUs, and were not interested in making the 16 bit microcoded processors that would allow the much higher level languages at Parc to run well in the 80s.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#795Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 optimi…
I should have assumed, given the results that PARC had, that it must have been that way. It's fantastic that I just got the answer to that question from... you.
For my second point -- I definitely didn't mean optimization that way. I guess the word I meant to use was "targeted", as in "targeted for multi-core" but I see your point and respect it fully.
I'm thrilled and deeply, deeply honored to have had this time with you, Dr. Kay. Thank you so much again. If you're ever in the Bay Area on the first Saturday of the month and feel inclined to stop briefly by the 2020 group meeting (which is an attempt at a replacement for the Future of Programming Workshops that used to take place at Strange Loop), we would be over the moon. You can reach out to Jonathan Edwards if you need the details.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#796Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 optimi…
I should have assumed, given the results that PARC had, that it must have been that way. It's fantastic that I just got the answer to that question from... you. For my second point -- I definitely didn't mean optimization that way. I guess the word I meant to use was "targeted", as in "targeted for multi-core" but I see your point and respect it fully. I'm thrilled and deeply, deeply honored to have had this time wit…
The basic principle of both points above is that "problem finding" is the hardest thing in "real research", so a lot of things need to be done to help this ... (this is a very tough sell and even "explain" today -- almost everyone is brought up -- especially in schools -- to solve problems, rather than to actually find good ones) -- and virtually all funders today want to know what problems their fundees are going to solve - so they underfund (to the point of 0!) the finding processes ...
The ARPA/Parc process "funded people, not projects" -- and today this seems quite outre to most.
As you probably know, Jonathan is doing some work with us ...
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#797Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are more than 23,000,000 books in the Library of Congress, and a good reader might be able to read 23,000 books in a lifetime (I know just a few people who have read more). So we are contemplating a lifetime of reading in which we might touch 1/10th of 1% of the extent books. We would hope that most of the ones we aren't able to touch are not useful or good or etc. So I think we have to put something more than…
General question about this figure, which I've seen before: > read 23,000 books in a lifetime As a very conservative lower bound, a person who lives to the age of 80 would have to read 0.79 books per day, from the day they were born, to reach this figure. Or, to put it another way, who has read 288+ books in the last year? I'm quite sceptical about this figure. Any thoughts as to how this might be possible? Are the p…
It depends on your definition of
"reading a book."
Wait, what?
I've been reading a book called, I kid you not, "How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading."
Adler and Doren identify four levels of reading:
1. Elementary: "What does the sentence say?" This is where speed can be gained
2. Inspectional: "What is the book about?" Best and most complete reading given a limited time. Not necessarily reading a book from front to back. Essentially systematic skimming.
3. Analytical: Best and most complete reading given unlimited time. For the sake of understanding.
4. Synoptical: Reading many books of the same subject at once, placing them in relation to one another, and constructing an analysis that may not be found in any of the books.
Amazon link for those interested: https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Intelligent-Touchstone/...
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#798Earlier quoted context omitted.
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, ...
Can you share some more seeds of thought on this? I sense you have better questions here than anything I can yet think to ask, myself :)
I'll take a crack at some things:
Actors are great patterns for encapsulating concurrency, but struggle in scaling --
because failure domains and persistence/forgetfulness on an intergalactic network aren't always lined up on the same borders as the actors?
What are some of dimensions of scaling would you identify as under-understood?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#799Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have every reason to like Actors! But think about scaling for a while, ...
Can you share some more seeds of thought on this? I sense you have better questions here than anything I can yet think to ask, myself :) I'll take a crack at some things: Actors are great patterns for encapsulating concurrency, but struggle in scaling -- because failure domains and persistence/forgetfulness on an intergalactic network aren't always lined up on the same borders as the actors? What are some of dimensio…
Just to bring up one possibly helpful analogy:
Suppose we have a good model of atoms -- how much of this will be a good way to think about living systems? (Or should we come up with better and more useful architectural ideas that are a better fit to the scales we are trying to deal with -- hint: in biology, they are not like atomic physics or even much of chemistry ...)
A point here is that trying to make atomic physics better will only help a little if at all. So trying to make early languages "much better" likely misses most if not all of the real progress that is needed on an Internet or larger scale.
(I personally think that much enterprise software even today needs architectural ideas and languages that are different in kind than the languages of the 60s and 70s (meaning most of the languages used today).
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#800Are you 2 years old?
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952046 and marked it off-topic.