I hope someone could tell Alan Kay about the Galaxy Note. It has a really nice pen and a place to put it.
Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
81–90 of 297 posts
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
actually I'd argue he understands the problem pretty well. He talks about needing to offer something SO compelling they cannot help but interface with it, in spite of their desire for things that do not push them.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 impleme…
> The iPad could have a spot for the pen. The pen could be tethered to the iPad.
Yes they could, but I really think this is subjective. In my case I prefer NOT to have a spot because of aesthetic reasons, plus I never use the stylus.
But like I said, this is subjective. And that's exactly the point. You can't really judge execution based on subjective qualities like this. It's impossible to satisfy everyone.
It's just a difference in vision. People have different priorities. For example the Bitcoin community right now is divided into two based on their philosophy, and you can't say one is right and one is wrong because each has their own vision and each side makes sense in their own right.
I'm sure Alan Kay had his own vision about what a computer could become. I think if he's so dissatisfied with what it's come to, the best approach is to build one himself and give it to the world. (But honestly, as someone who's been thinking a lot about this field, I see so many "plot holes" in all the criticism he's making)
I am all for visionaries building inspiring products and shipping to market. But it's sad to see people like him dwelling on the past instead of the future.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Herein lies a dangerous assumption prominent in neoliberal thinking: that "building something for people" is only possible by making something that is inherently "profitable." Kay has spoken endlessly on the fact that PARC was -- in spirit, structure, and personnel -- largely the last gasp of the ARPA/IPTO funding culture. That we don't have this kind of basic research funding anymore is one of the reasons we don't have inventions on par with the Internet and personal computing. This is one of the points he harps on about.
Few companies today will create anything that is a truly shattering invention, for the simple fact that companies are not structured to invest the time and money in ways that such inventions demand: decade long cycles, where failure and "wasting" money is the norm. The quarterly earnings cycle prevents this. What's worse, that cycle has been absorbed into the way politicians and governments now think. Today the NSF wants you to demonstrate how your research will produce the desired results when applying for grants. That's not how exploratory basic research works. You'll only ever get more arcane iterations on current systems and technologies.
Kay has spent his life doing this kind of exploratory research. PARC, Squeak, STEPS -- I'd call all of that "execution." But perhaps others who see businesses and profits as the sole reason to get up in the morning would disagree.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#85Earlier 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…
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…
I am far from an expert in Deconstruction, but I am an expert in mathematics and have read a fair amount on the foundations of mathematics. I find your description technically correct, but highly misleading.
The vast majority of mathematicians will agree with "no one true foundation". However, unlike the bulk of postmodern/deconstructive work, they are then perfectly happy to say "this particular foundation is good enough to explore some interesting ideas", as opposed to wallowing in the fact that they had to take a generative step to create the mooring of their meaning.
In my non-expert opinion, I think many people instinctively rebel against Deconstruction, not because they can't accept that there has to be a faith-act to pragmatically root meaning... but because Deconstructionists, having discovered that such faith acts are necessary, then refuse to engage with any particular choice made by people who want to discuss pragmatic meaning.
Mathematicians have long ago internalized the important, but ultimately quite limited, idea behind Deconstruction (which, by the way, they didn't need Deconstructionists to tell them, since the idea of having to subjectively choose an axiom system goes back at least to the Greeks). Having understood this, they have since moved on with their lives to continue to do important and valuable things, just as they were doing before. What have the Deconstructionists done?
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#86I kind of feel sorry for Alan Kay. He's trapped in endlessly rehashing ideas from 60's and 70's.
Unlike CS programs in high schools and universities. They're stuck in the 50s rehashing sorting algorithms for their students. Meanwhile an entire community of "programmers" was trained and let loose in the wild to endlessly engage in pedantic debates about type systems, or which ALGOL like language is the best for this-or-that.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#87I kind of feel sorry for Alan Kay. He's trapped in endlessly rehashing ideas from 60's and 70's.
Behind his curtain, it turned out that Alan Kay was a good man but a terrible wizard.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What should embarrass us so deeply and why? HTML and CSS are some of the most generative, enduring, and transformative technologies ever. I wouldn't fund anyone who doesn't recognize how great they are!
HTML & CSS were good for the early web, when it was a simple document layout platform. They're not ideal for building rich UIs and applications. Just because they've been extended to allow that doesn't mean they are the best tool for the job. Similarly, Excel is abused to do all sorts of things it's not intended for as well, when there are better options for databases, financial applications and data science.
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#89For 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 publ…
Are binaries available, to run in a VM at least? Also, can you provide a link to the source code?
Re: Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true
#90This 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…
>We need people who are willing to experiment with new ideas and give us something better than HTML/CSS/JS. And we need them to get funding.
It’s coming. In 5 years Javascript development will be a distant bad memory. Front end web will become much like native mobile development but with a richer ecosystem of IDE’s and languages based around WASM.