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

71–80 of 297 posts

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

#71

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

discreteevent wrote: post #67
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #52

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…

Anyone who has put as much work into it as Kay has and delivered as many innovations is absolutely entitled to criticize. He is especially entitled to criticize products that built on his ideas but because of some fundamental flaws actually hobble the ideas and hobble society. This is important to point out and if he isn't qualified to do so then who is?

There's a difference between badmouthing and constructive criticism. Try reading through the entire article. I did. And there's tons of badmouthing and condescension.

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

#72

Post by DonbunEf7 »

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…

Deconstruction is a way of viewing reality which comes naturally equipped with a process for disassembling ideas (the "deconstructive process") as well as a process for viewing ideas as the synthesis of other ideas (the "constructive process"). The core is this: all semantics are relative, all observations surface-level, and all truths buried in the raw materials. But since the materials are themselves relative, all truths are ultimately undefinable, recursively unknowable. To see a house is to know that it was built on a foundation, that its walls are made of gypsum, and that the number of children living there are proportional to the number of toys left on the lawn. Conversely, to see a corporate email thread is to know the shape of the corporate power structure, the bickering between departments, the products under development, and the CEO's ability to curse. Everything is connected and related. This is the entailment of postmodernism, where we first glimpsed that narrative truths could be relative; now, we know that reality itself is relative, whether it is the reality of a book or the reality of our current "real-world" narrative.

Deconstruction isn't bullshit, but we've been swimming in deconstructive and reconstructive narrative media for nearly half a century, and it has altered how we critique media so heavily that people don't see it as a distinct feature of their worldview. (Great example: Folks seem to love Rick & Morty, a deconstructive soft sci-fi serial, and also Steven Universe, a reconstructive soft sci-fi serial, both of which are running on a network which markets to youth, not literature postdocs.)

Kay, like Derrida, hasn't been unable to explain to people for lack of words, but because the enormity of the paradigm shift means that no number of words will necessarily suffice.

(Aside: If you are rubbed wrong by the first paragraph, in particular because you believe that reality is absolute or that truth is definable, then do not fear. You are merely having trouble overcoming instincts. Trust in mathematics; postmodernism arrived in mathematics in 1874, was completed in 1930, and is widely accepted by the mathematical community as meta-truth. Dissenters exist but necessarily must accept the meta-truth ("There is no one true foundation for mathematics.") to avoid being laughed out of the room.)

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

#73

Post by andreasgonewild »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #52

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…

There are plenty of things worth doing that are not profitable. If anything, the people who made the profits where standing on the shoulders of giants like Kay; I think we can afford him some space to be grumpy over shitty execution and lack of vision. It's a matter of perspective; what you call cool things, Kay would call consumer bull crap; and I tend to agree.

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

#74

Post by noam87 »

Reminds of what the people of Red lang are trying to achieve: http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html?m=1

Maybe I'll finally give it a try!

Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app platform" built on top of Scheme and IPFS. -- Perhaps Red would actually be perfect for this...

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

#75

Post by detaro »

noam87 wrote: post #74

Reminds of what the people of Red lang are trying to achieve: http://www.red-lang.org/p/about.html?m=1 Maybe I'll finally give it a try! Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app platform" built on top of Scheme and IPFS. -- Perhaps Red would actually be perfect for this...

> Every once in a while I daydream about a sort of "distributed app platform"

Have a peek at dat and beaker browser, they've done interesting stuff in that regard recently.

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

#76

Post by shalabhc »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #71
discreteevent wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone who has put as much work into it as Kay has and delivered as many innovations is absolutely entitled to criticize. He is especially entitled to criticize products that built on his ideas but because of some fundamental flaws actually hobble the ideas and hobble society. This is important to point out and if he isn't qualified to do so then who is?

There's a difference between badmouthing and constructive criticism. Try reading through the entire article. I did. And there's tons of badmouthing and condescension.

The article is filtered through another reporter and I didn't find specific instance of badmouthing (but my reading is also filtered through my own notion of where I think Alan Kay is coming from.)

If you're interested in what Kay really means, maybe listen to some of his numerous other talks?

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

#77

Post by cocktailpeanuts »

andreasgonewild wrote: post #73
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #52

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…

There are plenty of things worth doing that are not profitable. If anything, the people who made the profits where standing on the shoulders of giants like Kay; I think we can afford him some space to be grumpy over shitty execution and lack of vision. It's a matter of perspective; what you call cool things, Kay would call consumer bull crap; and I tend to agree.

If you're not building something for people, what are you building? Art?

I'm fine with that, but just because you're making art, doesn't mean everyone else is an idiot.

Also I think it's very condescending to think that others didn't have vision.

Lastly it's cheap to criticize someone else for "shitty execution" when you yourself have the ability to show with your own execution but you clearly haven't. It's easy to throw around the word "execution" but it's not an easy thing to do.

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

#78

Post by loup-vaillant »

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #70
loup-vaillant wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (and by execution I don't just mean invention of a prototype but actual productization and distribution) So, the STEPS project I mentioned above¹ doesn't count? Bret Victor's work wouldn't count? That's incredibly short sighted. You seem to have missed the part where it's really really hard to be successful with unnatural stuff, even when that stuff is unbelievably useful and valuable. Writing is unnatural, and too…

> So, the STEPS project I mentioned above¹ doesn't count? Bret Victor's work wouldn't count? That's incredibly short sighted. It is incredibly short sighted to make an assumption about what I said and criticize on that wrong assumption. There's a term for this logical fallacy but i forget. Anyway, there's a huge difference between coming up with an idea/prototype and turning it into a product that's meant for mainstr…

> It is incredibly short sighted to make an assumption about what I said and criticize on that wrong assumption.

Are you saying I was mistaken and the STEPS project and Bret Victor's demos do count after all? Even though they're prototypes that haven't been "productised and distributed"?

I merely assumed you meant what you wrote. If you didn't, don't complain.

> What I'm criticizing is his comments on Apple's implementation decisions on things like the stylus.

Come on, that criticism was spot on. The iPad could have a spot for the pen. The pen could be tethered to the iPad. Apple could have sold pen like they now do. The Nintendo DS ships with a freaking pen.

I'm reluctant to dispute your point in general, but that was a bad example.

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

#79

Post by sytse »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #17
sytse wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it interesting that Google Docs also doeen't have branching undo. There is no way to revert a commit, you can only go back in time. And there is no blame. I loved the article by the way. The future of writing should be version controlled Juniper notebooks. Next step for GitLab is to build a cloud IDE to bring that closer.

Google Docs has blame by looking at the history of changes in the file, although I will admit that it is not the most obvious.

They have a commit history. But if I want to see who last changed a certain line I have to go through the history until I see the change. I would love something like https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blame/master/CONTRIB...

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

#80

Post by Animats »

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…

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.

He did. There's "Personal Dynamic Media", the classic paper.[1] Kay's vision focused on the user as creator, rather than consumer, of information. In practice, most people are content to watch the boob tube, now available in handheld. This has been the frustration of new media inventors from Edison to Zworykin. What Kay is complaining about is the banality of computing today. That's a problem with humans, not computers.

Kay also thought that discrete event simulation was going to be really important. Smalltalk is based on SIMULA, which was a discrete event extension of ALGOL-60. Objects were supposed to be entities in the simulation. In practice, discrete event simulation is a tiny niche application of computing.

(I got a tour of PARC in 1975 when taking a course at UC Santa Cruz, met Kay and Goldberg, and saw some of the first Altos. The idea back then was "this is what can be done with enough money. Someday it will be cheap." Eventually it was, but not soon enough for Xerox. Years later, I programmed an Alto in Mesa while at Stanford, although by then it was obsolete.)

[1] http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf

Post reply on HN