writing diminished thinking and reasoning capacity, computers continued offloading cognitive functions to adaptive machines. dig up, stupid! is a fitting epithet.
Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
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Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#32If, like Alan Kay, you think we need a major overhaul in software construction and are in the San Francisco Bay Area, let me know. I'm part of a group that meets on Saturdays once a month and we work on side research projects toward that end. My email is in my profile.
If anyone in the Boston area is interested in whiteboarding high-skill software development environments in the context of 2018/2019 hardware, I'd be interested. So: continuous speech recognition; hand tracking, controllers, and haptic exoskeletons, but still keyboards; HMDs with 30+ px/deg, and eye tracking, but still screens.
Dynabook was a nice vision. As always, society executed poorly, and failed to realize much of the potential of its technologies. No doubt that will happen again with VR/AR. For example, there's a toxic cauldron of patents brewing. Screens and keyboards and mice, have had a good half-century run. And GUIs, and personal local hardware. But perhaps time to shift focus.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#33> rather than the wheels for the mind that Steve Jobs envisioned. Proper quote, for those confused: "I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. Humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the list....That didn't look so good, but then someone at Scientific American had the insigh…
oblig. Bikes need road infrastructure, or at the very least, a path cleared of trees/underbrush (though less efficient). Condors don't.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#34It's clear from the interview that Kay thinks mobile computing isn't where it should be. But I haven't studied the DynaBook. Does anyone know exactly what Kay thinks is needed, in order to realize his dream? I found a few such things in the article: - more-discoverable undo - some sort of AI-based virtual assistant - a stylus and holder, and presumably input methods and applications that are better suited for that st…
What's missing in today's software is described by the field of End User Development, the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language. For most people, using computers means being force-feed a selection of existing applications; and most applications are pro- consumption, which is favoured by the media companies. App stores (and the Linux repositor…
>the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.
The problem with that is that normal people often have formal requirements that software has to meet in order to be useful.
Therefore I think the secret to end-user programming is not to be less formal. It's to be less complete or less general - DSLs.
But at that point you could legitimately ask whether it's programming at all or just configuration and what was actually achieved compared to the status quo.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#35I found it interesting that in an HN discussion about how to auto-update comments Alan Kay said, "How about a little model of time in a GUI?"[1] It ties into when he said of smartphone apps, "It's painful to see people using billions of devices that have forgot that undo is a good idea." [2] It made me think about how things like Redux (or even just Google Drive revision history) where you can 'time travel' through s…
It is painful that most desktop apps never even got branching undo/redo.
Most non-technical people I know have trouble with "simple" undo-redo and copy-paste ; this would only make it harder for them.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#36If, like Alan Kay, you think we need a major overhaul in software construction and are in the San Francisco Bay Area, let me know. I'm part of a group that meets on Saturdays once a month and we work on side research projects toward that end. My email is in my profile.
If anyone in the Boston area is interested in whiteboarding high-skill software development environments in the context of 2018/2019 hardware, I'd be interested. So: continuous speech recognition; hand tracking, controllers, and haptic exoskeletons, but still keyboards; HMDs with 30+ px/deg, and eye tracking, but still screens. Dynabook was a nice vision. As always, society executed poorly, and failed to realize much…
When you say society always executes poorly, what alternative social reality are you comparing it with?
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#37It's clear from the interview that Kay thinks mobile computing isn't where it should be. But I haven't studied the DynaBook. Does anyone know exactly what Kay thinks is needed, in order to realize his dream? I found a few such things in the article: - more-discoverable undo - some sort of AI-based virtual assistant - a stylus and holder, and presumably input methods and applications that are better suited for that st…
What's missing in today's software is described by the field of End User Development, the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language. For most people, using computers means being force-feed a selection of existing applications; and most applications are pro- consumption, which is favoured by the media companies. App stores (and the Linux repositor…
> the ability for normal people to craft new software artifacts without the need to learn a formal programming language.
The problem is not programming. It's conceiving. You can get 8 years old kids to do pretty advanced imperative algorithms with scratch. What's hard is to get people to write down in a blank sheet what they actually want to do (mostly because you think you want something and then when you've got this thing you notice you actually wanted something a bit different).
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#38This isn't the first time Alan Kay express his view on HTML / CSS and Javascitpt. But what alternative do we have / had?
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#39I kind of feel sorry for Alan Kay. He's trapped in endlessly rehashing ideas from 60's and 70's.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#40Neglecting path dependence is the root of all evil. I mean, he’s not wrong, but maybe the answer is just that this is fucking hard. And some of his specifics are just wrong. The pen? No. It’s super useful in some areas, like drawing, but if you include it by default you get lazy developers making UI that depends on it for navigation. Apple absolutely made the right call. I’m not taking away any of his amazing contributions, but his habit of slamming every incremental bit of mainstream, at-scale tech because it doesn’t fulfill his vision (yet) is not that helpful.