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Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

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121–130 of 297 posts

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

#121

I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools. To make quality content, whether it be apps/music/movies/etc..it requires much more than tools. I respect Alan Kay, but I don't understand the need to bash on modern day technology. Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not [Example: 0]. But in terms of the digital world, I can take a video of my pa…

>I don't buy it that everyone would be a digital creative if they just had the right tools. To make _quality_ content,...

who cares about quality ? who is the judge of what "quality" is ? As long as someone can create the content _and distribute it_, they are a digital creative.

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

#122
post #47
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…

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

#123
I recognize the Alan Kay I met at HP. Very sure of his own genius and quick to snarkily dismiss the genius of others.

Case in point: The iPad and iPhone makes kids creative like no other tool has before. Kids know how to use it to text, exchange ideas or pictures of kittens, draw or sketch, learn how to program (Swift Playground anyone), take and edit photos. It is everything but a glorified TV where kids are passive. This is the only environment where kids are truly first-class citizens. How on earth Kay could spend so much energy (a whole article) trying to convince us otherwise based mostly on super-weak arguments like "nobody is using the Shake gesture to undo" is truly beyond my understanding.

Don't get me wrong. The Dynabook was a somewhat interesting idea. But it's about as much an inspiration for the real thing we use daily as the Star Trek tricorder. What Kay, to this day, did not get, unlike Jobs, is the power of networking, both physical and human. What made the iPhone greater than the Dynabook ever would have been is the App Store, and the combined creativity of millions of developers. What made the iPhone greater is apps like Messages, Facetime, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and countless others. What made the iPhone greater is Instagram, Flickr, sport apps, medical apps, HP-48 emulators, 3D "kill them all and think later" games.

By contrast, what would have made the Dynabook great in Kay's mind was "designed by Kay for Kay's personal interests". Or, as Fake Bill Gates would have said: "One programmer should be enough for everybody".

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

#124
Let me try to help this community regarding this article by providing some context. First, you need to realize that in the more than 50 years of my career I have always waited to be asked: Every paper, talk, and interview has been invited, never solicited. But there is a body of results from these that do put forward my opinions.

This article was a surprise, because the interview was a few years ago for a book the interviewer was writing. It's worth noting that nowhere in the actual interview did I advocate going back and doing a Dynabook. My comments are mostly about media and why it's important to understand and design well any medium that will be spread and used en-mass.

If you looked closely, then you would have noticed the big difference between the interview and the front matter. For example, I'm not still waiting for my dream to come true. You need to be sophisticated enough to see that this is a headline written to attract. It has nothing to do with what I said.

And, if you looked closely, you might note a non seq right in the beginning, from "you want to see old media?" to no followup. This is because that section was taken from the chapter of the book but then edited by others.

The first version of the article said I was fired from Apple, but it was Steve who was fired, and some editor misunderstood.

In the interview itself there are transcription mistakes that were not found and corrected. And of course they didn't send me article ahead of time (I could have fixed all this).

I think I would only have made a few parts of the interview a little more understandable. It's raw, but -- once you understand the criticisms -- I think most will find them quite valid. In the interview -- to say it again -- I'm not calling for the field to implement my vision -- but I am calling for the field to have a larger vision of civilization and how mass media and our tools contribute or detract from it. Thoreau had a good line. He said "We become the tools of our tools" -- meaning, be very careful when you design tools and put them out for use. (Our consumer based technology field is not being at all careful.)

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

#125
post #10

Earlier 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.

So what? It shouldn't be too difficult to implement three states of userspace and have it be selected upon login:

- Novice - Advanced - Expert

'Novice' gives you simple 'undo'. 'Advanced' gives you 'undo' with history. And 'Expert' gives you branching. For example... For file-managers this could be made so, that the novice gets something like the Finder or WindowsExplorer. Basically a file-browser, that handles its pane contents as a document. 'Advanced' gives you tabs, rearrangable layouts (dual-pane) and some more configuration. 'Expert' gives you fully configurable menus and toolbars, integrated with the hosts generic scripting host. Etc.

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

#126

Let me try to help this community regarding this article by providing some context. First, you need to realize that in the more than 50 years of my career I have always waited to be asked: Every paper, talk, and interview has been invited, never solicited. But there is a body of results from these that do put forward my opinions. This article was a surprise, because the interview was a few years ago for a book the in…

Wow, this article is a pretty egregious misinterpretation of those points. I didn't come away with anything even vaguely resembling what you just said, even if we disregard the factual errors.

Candidly, your comments here make a lot more sense than some "We haven't yet built the DynaBook the way we should" piece.

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

#128
post #80
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…

Doesn't your typical business application model some discrete events on the real world? Why is object oriented programming so popular of it doesn't meet needs of software it helped to write? There should be some correspondance between principles that layed foundation of OOP and their application, and OOP's popularity os not a coincidence

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

#129
Simplicity is closely related to education, and education is closely related to freedom.

How are we supposed to take education seriously when we create devices of such complexity that they are essentially magic, and hand them to students?

Before computers, complexity always had tight upper bounds. A watch could only get so complex before it wouldn't fit in its housing; and a car could only get so complex before it could not be efficiently manufactured/repaired. With computers, there is no upper bound to the complexity.

We are now overrun with complexity, but it's hard to see how to fix that. A business that puts blind faith in a complex system to do something slightly faster/better will probably win against a business that tries to truly understand what it's doing. An employee who just keeps adding to the complexity will probably win against an employee stepping back to simplify things. A consumer who makes convenient choices about complex things without asking many questions will probably find life easier.

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

#130
post #10

Earlier 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.

If everyone took the time to really learn and understand advanced undo/redo, I wonder how that would change our thinking? Might we find all kinds of new ways to apply it in the physical world?

Maybe the reason people find it hard now is just the limit of natural languages as they exist today. We haven't made time travel, alternative realities, and hypotheticals a part of our ordinary speech (beyond trivial cases), but maybe we should?

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