I think you are subscribing to an incorrect and unhelpful use of the word trigger. Did you mean "upset", "annoy", "inconvenience", or "anger", perhaps?
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
851–860 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#852Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I misspoke. I just tried doing what I described, with String. Squeak notified me about "obsolete references" to the original class name in existing source code. It's been a long time since I did this. I might've seen that before when I did this, and I guess it left me with the impression that it was not capable of adapting to the change by itself. The name change didn't cause a problem in continuing to use String, even in the compiler, such as doing in a workspace: 'hello world ', 'hi there'.
I am familiar with Method Finder. I've used it several times with varying degrees of success. Sometimes I found that what I was trying to describe couldn't be expressed with the conventions it uses. I am also familiar with the fact that all of that functionality is accessible from a set of objects, but my understanding is you have to explicitly use those objects in your code to look up by description. If you just say "Classname new", you're not going to get that. That's what I was talking about (at least trying to :) ) in my previous comment.
BTW, I read Ted Kaehler's paper on using the aforementioned objects to try to access objects, if I remember correctly, within Squeak strictly by description, as a means to try out methods for "computing through negotiating with objects." It seemed to come with a little difficulty, as I remember him talking about some number of "destructive actions" that happened as a result. Interesting experiment. I had the thought around then that in order for negotiation to happen safely, the receiving system would need to put objects in a "test harness" to prevent such destructive actions.
Working with Method Finder was one of the examples I used as inspiration for trying to "sketch" a language where the idea was I could "program by suggestion," which I described in an earlier comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945188).
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#853This is one of the best threads HN has ever seen and we couldn't be more thrilled to have had such an interesting and wide-ranging discussion. I know I'm not the only one who will be going back over the wealth of insights, ideas, and pointers here in the weeks to come. Alan, a huge and heartfelt thanks from all of us. The quality and quantity (over 250 posts!) of what you shared with the community surpassed all expec…
I agree. Alread read several hundred of them. Looks like I gotta come back for anotger 200 or so. Just so many interesting subthreads here with who knows what impact waiting to happen. Thanks to you and HN for arranging it.
The same here. I reread it already two times. Made a ton of notes.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#854Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Meta is dangerous" so a safe meta-language within a language will have "fences" to protect. (Note that "assignment" to a variable is "meta" in a functional language (and you might want to use a "roll back 'worlds' mechanism" (like transactions) for safety when this is needed.) This is a parallel to various kinds of optimization (many of which violate module boundaries in some way) -- there are ways to make this a lo…
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?
Rust has quite powerful macros (hygienic macros). It is still not a major programming language, but it wants to be one.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#855Earlier quoted context omitted.
possible takeaway: even Alan Kay knows not to wade into the religious war that is vi-or-emacs ;-)
I think one thing that scared him away was the word "relevant"... VIM might have as well (very primitive). Emacs tries to do some things that are worth doing, but it brings the user into "textland," not "systemland."
Are we in a "textland" or a "systemland" when we have these symbolic conversations on HN across space and time?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#856Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alan, what is your view on Olive Executable Archive ? https://olivearchive.org/
The Internet Archive ( http://archive.org ) is doing the same thing. They have old software stored that you can run in online emulators. I only wish they had instructions for how to use the emulators. The old keyboards and controllers are not like today's.
Here is another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#857Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data like that sentence? Or all of the other sentences in this chat? I find 'data' hard to consider a bad idea in and of itself, i.e. if data == information, records of things known/uttered at a point in time. Could you talk more about data being a bad idea?
Take a look here: https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/sicp-what-is-meant-b...
Your blog looks very interesting. You should share some links of it here on hackernews!
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#858Earlier quoted context omitted.
I get (a) and (b) completely. On (c), I felt this way about NCSA Mosaic in 1993 when I first saw it and I'm relieved to hear you say this because although I definitely misunderstood a major technology shift for a few years, maybe I wasn't wrong in my initial reaction that it was stupid.
I didn't begin to get it until the industry started trying to use browsers for applications in the late '90s/early 2000's. I took one look at the "stateful" architecture they were trying to use, and I said to myself, "This is a hack." I learned shortly thereafter about criticism of it saying the same thing, "This is an attempt to impose statefulness on an inherently stateless architecture." I kept wondering why the i…
How can we bring back X11 and good old interactive architecture to the generation of programmers growing up with AngularJS and ReactJS?
Or shall we reboot good ideas with IoT?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#859Earlier quoted context omitted.
Data like that sentence? Or all of the other sentences in this chat? I find 'data' hard to consider a bad idea in and of itself, i.e. if data == information, records of things known/uttered at a point in time. Could you talk more about data being a bad idea?
What is "data" without an interpreter (and when we send "data" somewhere, how can we send it so its meaning is preserved?)
So the idea is to always send the interpreter, along with the data? They should always travel together?
Interesting. But, practically, the interpreter would need to be written in such a way that it works on all target systems. The world isn't set up for that, although it should be.
Hm, I now realize your point about HTML being idiotic. It should be a description, along with instructions for parsing and displaying it (?)
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#860At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered: * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that) *…
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…
It's unfortunate that the order of the clauses in SQL is "wrong"
SQL is written goal-oriented.
You start with what you want (the goal). Then you specify from where (which can also be read as "what", since each table generally describes a thing) and finally you constrain it to the specific instances you care about.
SELECT the information I want FROM the thing that I care about WHERE condition constrains results to the few I want
Having said that, I would personally still prefer it in reverse like you say. I can see the value of how SQL does it, though, especially for non-programmers who think less about the process of getting the results and more about the results they want (because they haven't been trained to think of the process, like programmers have).
It makes sense for someone who isn't thaaaaat technical to start with "well, I want the name and salary of the employee but only those that are managers": SELECT name, salary FROM employee WHERE position = 'manager'
Admittedly even that isn't perfect and I assume that it wouldn't take much for someone to learn the reverse.