Interesting that neither Kay nor the interviewer seemed aware of Swift Playgrounds. I would have loved to hear his criticisms of that environment as a teaching tool for kids. It seems to be targeted at 8-12 year olds given the graphics. I would be curious as to how closely Swift Playgrounds follows Papert’s ideas.
Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
41–50 of 297 posts
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#42For all the respect and admiration I have for Alan Kay, I think he's often showing a lot of bad faith. His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I'm sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him. Of course, part of it is "design principles". But then do some common use cases. When the abstraction meets reality we get…
Maybe you disagree with him or perhaps think his position is ill-considered or too woolly or somesuch. But 'bad faith'? You really believe he's being intentionally duplicitous and deceptive?
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#43> 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.
Pretty sure Condors need a clear path. You usually don't see them flying below the tree tops low to the ground.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#44Just today I read that VPRI fonc mailing list was shutting down because they shifted focus onto other area (communication design or something like that). A YC incubator thing IIRC.
YC HARC - harc.ycr.org
Thanks a lot.
ps: project list is cool http://harc.ycr.org/project/
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#45I 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.
I'd heard vim does, but when the situation came where I needed it, it turned out I'm fine with just moving back in time.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Toys vs tools. I want paying my electric bill to by trivial. If I'm doing real work, I want all the power software can give me.
I can forgive my retired grandmother for not getting copy and paste. A professional however, should constantly strive to improve their mastery of their tools.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#47For all the respect and admiration I have for Alan Kay, I think he's often showing a lot of bad faith. His ideal vision is always described in very abstract terms. If he took the care to write it down precisely, what it should look like, I'm sure there would be hundreds eager to build it for him. Of course, part of it is "design principles". But then do some common use cases. When the abstraction meets reality we get…
On Hackernews there was once a skeptic of postmodernism who got into a debate with a Derrida fan. The skeptic said "If deconstruction is not BS, how about you explain to us, in plain English, what it's all about." The Derrida fan replied "No. How about you demonstrate that you've read Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Levinas. Then we can begin to talk about Derrida."
If Alan Kay were like the Derrida fan, then he could have rebuffed anyone who came asking what the Dynabook was about with "How about you demonstrate that you've studied the achievements of McLuhan, Montessori, Papert, Minsky, Engelbart, etc. Then we'll talk." Of course he's not like that so he's going to try to give the reporter a bit of the background he has in those things and let them figure it out for themself.
The Dynabook is supposed to be, roughly, an iPad with a keyboard, stylus, and a Lisp Machine-like OS. Of course Apple and third parties have closed the gap with keyboards and styli but it's the OS that's the really important bit because in order for a Dynabook to be a Dynabook it must not be a thing that you can just download and run preapproved apps on. You have to be able to discover -- and change -- the entire system from the bare metal on up. Think "Stallmanism on steroids".
It's like a television you can talk back to. Computing is a dynamic medium that demands interaction from its user, so to deny the user the ability to question and change the assumptions of the medium is to lock them in to certain stereotyped modes of interaction and deny the full richness of the medium. This is where Kay's "real guitar vs. Guitar Hero" analogy comes in. You can either have a device that offers its full potential up front, like a real guitar, or you can have a device that can only be used in circumscribed ways, in vague imitation of having the full richness of the original device, like Guitar Hero. The price you pay for having a real guitar, or a real Dynabook, is what we call "ease of use" -- the ability for a complete neophyte to pick it up and immediately display something resembling proficiency with it. (It is much easier for a trained data-entry clerk to operate a 3270 terminal than it is for that same clerk to fill out a modern Web form, but that sort of ease doesn't count.) And Apple has really doubled down on ease of use, at the expense of everything else wonderful about having a powerful computing device you can hold in one hand. To the point where it's become just like regular, can't-talk-back-to-it television.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thi…
You'd be surprised the kind of people who's able to create functional applications and complex data models in my office. The point for common users to define software behaviour is doing it iteratively, with every step being based on a previous functional version.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#49I kind of feel sorry for Alan Kay. He's trapped in endlessly rehashing ideas from 60's and 70's.
What new ideas are there though? Social networking I guess. Have you seen the mother of all demos? Engelbart's team invented, like, everything.
On the programming side, dependent types maybe. Everything else is from ml or lisp.
Neural networks are old old ideas as well. Computers have finally gotten fast enough to make use of the ideas.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#50This isn't the first time Alan Kay express his view on HTML / CSS and Javascitpt. But what alternative do we have / had?
I have a new alternative called Tree Notation:
https://github.com/breck7/treenotation
A sample from an HTML replacement:
@html
@body
@div Hello world
@a
cursor pointer
text-decoration none