Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

fastcompany.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 297 posts

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#51

Post by [deleted] »

david927 wrote: post #21
ksec wrote: post #19

This isn't the first time Alan Kay express his view on HTML / CSS and Javascitpt. But what alternative do we have / had?

That's the problem here, actually, but not in the way you think. There are alternatives (Canvas, SVG, etc.) but they're not as good for the standard use case of coming up with something quick that fulfills the business requirement. And then we need to recognize that that stack is a fucking abomination that should be burned with fire. It should so deeply embarrass us, that we wouldn't want to admit that we use it in p…

[deleted]

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#52

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

I have total respect for Alan Kay but I hope he stops criticizing other people and actually shows his vision through his own execution (and by execution I don't just mean invention of a prototype but actual productization and distribution)

If you're building something visionary and are not the one who's making tons of money off of it, you have two solutions:

1. IF you're interested in making money: Try to figure out what you're doing wrong and fix it so you actually CAN capitalize on your original invention

2. IF you're NOT interested in making money: Enjoy the respect these people pay you and please don't badmouth others who worked hard to build important products that changed the world.

I feel like Alan Kay is on the second boat, so my heart breaks whenever he badmouths other people who worked hard to build cool things.

It doesn't matter what came first. What matters is what actually managed to pull off the ultimate success.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#53

Post by breck »

david927 wrote: post #13

If, 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.

Interesting. Email sent!

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#54

Post by kennethfriedman »

agumonkey wrote: post #7

Just 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.

Hey, the FONC mailing list isn't shutting down! It's just moving! It's now hosted at MIT instead of VPRI. It's located here:

http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/fonclist

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#55

Post by sbov »

jcelerier wrote: post #37
TuringTest wrote: post #30

Earlier 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 don't need to be able to write down in a blank sheet what you actually want to do if you don't need someone else to do what you want to do.

Software developers aren't special in this sense - even when writing our own software we can't do what you want. This is why "scratching your own itch" is so much easier than the alternative. You reduce the "is this what I really want?" loop by an order of magnitude by cutting out most of the people from the process.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#56

Post by digi_owl »

bitwize wrote: post #47
norswap wrote: post #18

For 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…

The basic problem there is that no company in the industry, from Apple all the way to the lowliest gray box manufacturer in China is not interested in that.

OLPC tried, it got hoodwinked by Microsoft et al.

Mozilla tried, FirefoxOS bombed.

Hell even Linux is turning ever more complex an opaque year by year.

Simple thing is that such flexibility self support do not sell widgets and support contracts, and thus company are not interested in making them.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#57

Post by bitwize »

digi_owl wrote: post #56
bitwize wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The basic problem there is that no company in the industry, from Apple all the way to the lowliest gray box manufacturer in China is not interested in that. OLPC tried, it got hoodwinked by Microsoft et al. Mozilla tried, FirefoxOS bombed. Hell even Linux is turning ever more complex an opaque year by year. Simple thing is that such flexibility self support do not sell widgets and support contracts, and thus company…

Well, yeah. For the benefits to be realized you need a society that values that sort of thing. It will look quite a bit different from our society, just like societies with writing are completely different from entirely oral societies -- something else Kay touches on.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#58

Post by loup-vaillant »

norswap wrote: post #18

For 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…

You must not be familiar with the STEPS project, a complete OS project (with a compiler collection, 2D vector drawing and compositing, desktop publishing, online communications…), in 20K lines of code. Mainstream OSes by comparison are more like 200M lines (10K books).

That stuff is pretty concrete, with an actual GUI and real software. One can get their hands on the source code, though it's really not meant for public consumption (it was a proof of concept, not a commercial product).

Here are the progress reports (latest first):

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2012001_steps.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2009016_steps09.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2008004_steps08.pdf

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2007008_steps.pdf

That stuff definitely works out to a vision.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#59

Post by digi_owl »

ktRolster wrote: post #26
pcl wrote: post #15

It'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…

more-discoverable undo I think he wanted more discoverable everything, the undo was just used as a particularly bad example on the iPhone. He wants the world to be more discoverable, to modify our very culture so that learning is easy (an example he gave was with math, so it's not just a small, 'smart' percentage of the population who actually gets it, but everyone absorbs it from a young age).

In the end i think he, like many intellectuals, overestimate people's interest in learning.

Aka you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

#60

Post by agumonkey »

kennethfriedman wrote: post #54
agumonkey wrote: post #7

Just 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.

Hey, the FONC mailing list isn't shutting down! It's just moving! It's now hosted at MIT instead of VPRI. It's located here: http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/fonclist

ha good to know, I only read a few mail on that thread maybe I missed the part where they mentionned relocation.
Post reply on HN