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Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true

fastcompany.com

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

#131

Post by Tossrock »

alankay wrote: post #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 in…

Professor Kay, it's an honor to see you taking the time to provide context to this interview. For what it's worth, I was skimming the article until I saw your comments on human universals, and that made me sit up and take notice. From that point on, it was pretty clear to me you were sounding a note of alarm about the addictive quality of our current consumer electronics industry, and the wasted potential of them as pedagogic devices.

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

#132

Post by justin66 »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #58
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 publ…

> One can get their hands on the source code

Where?

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

#133

Post by _dps »

bitwize wrote: post #119
_dps wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

> What have the Deconstructionists done? Deconstruction changed the way we think about what we read, see, and hear, and taught us to question the assumptions inherent in the same. It gave us the spaghetti western, cyberpunk, and arguably punk rock itself (and it definitely influenced hip hop and dub). Always remember that postmodernism is "defense against the dark arts" for the left. The techniques of playing shell g…

> Deconstruction changed the way we think about what we read, see, and hear, and taught us to question the assumptions inherent in the same. It gave us the spaghetti western, cyberpunk, and arguably punk rock itself (and it definitely influenced hip hop and dub).

I've seen related claims before, and, having attempted to dig into them, my impression as a lay person is that what is called "postmodern literature" is actually not obviously connected to postmodern thought and deconstruction.

I personally find, for example, the idea of an unreliable narrator or non-linear storytelling not to be obviously derived from the idea of the subjectivity of anchors of truth. There are of course superficial similarities, but I see no evidence that the academic and philosophical ideas were in any way necessary for the literary, musical, and cinematic ideas. My feeling about the alleged similarities is about the same as the claims that Cubism was deeply connected to allegedly parallel ideas in the physics of relativity -- ideas that would pass in an art house, given enough narcotics, but that do not withstand serious scrutiny if one actually knows anything about the origins of ideas in physics.

So I wonder if you would be able to draw me a straight line from, say, Derrida to The Sex Pistols? Or to explain to me how Gibson's Neuromancer would not exist but for Foucault? These are not rhetorical questions -- I would be truly grateful to receive a good answer, and it might just turn around my generally low opinion of the post-60s contributions of postmodernism and deconstruction.

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

#134

Post by TuringTest »

sbov wrote: post #55
jcelerier wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cuttin…

> 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.

This.

Why is it so hard for developers to understand this simple idea?

Life in computing would be so much easier if the people building the system understood what part of their job is essential (finding out the best way to arrange hardware and software to satisfy a requirement) and which part is circumstancial, gathering a set of precise requirements to begin with.

The last part wouldn't be needed if end users were able to build their own working prototypes to solve their needs, and engineers were simply called to rebuild the prototype with best engineering practices.

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

#135

Post by shalabhc »

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…

If you want to study the ideas of the dynabook, here you go: http://www.newmediareader.com/book_samples/nmr-26-kay.pdf

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

#136

Post by TeMPOraL »

jfoutz wrote: post #46
jcelerier wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. Toys vs. tools. Or, as AK put in the interview:

"Well, a saying I made up at PARC was, “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” They’ve got simple things being simple and they have complex things being impossible, so that’s wrong."

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

#137

Post by TuringTest »

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #34
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 with that is that normal people often have formal requirements that software has to meet in order to be useful. Therefore I think the secret to end-user programming is not to be less formal. It's to be less complete or less general - DSLs. But at that point you could legitimately ask whe…

You're right about DSLs; they're the greatest tool for tasks that require a formal spec.

The thing is, not all tasks that users engage with need a formal sspecification. For those, the ability to iterate and refine quickly is more valuable than having a precise description of every machine behaviour; I'm thing of things like page structure on Wikipedia (optional, and done with simple text markup); or the structure of documents in outlets like OneNote or Evernote, or attributes in Excel tables, which are all easy to re-arrange on the fly without needing a data schema.

All my examples refer to data structure. What's missing is that kind of lightweight, optional structure for behaviour. All current software, except debuggers and unit tests, expect a fully defined program to be defined before execution.

Power users need a top level loop that could execute partially specified functions over any DSL, prompting user input for the parts of the procedure not yet specified, and the capability to expand the DSLs themselves. There's nothing in the status quo like that, although environments like Hypertalk, Squeak and Excel are close, yet limited to a single DSL each.

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

#138

Post by TeMPOraL »

mkhalil wrote: post #102

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 see the problem right here:

"To make quality content ..."

The right tools shouldn't be about creating "content", they should be about letting you solve your own problems, instead of trying to transform them into problems you can buy a solution for. Creative arts are only subset of this - they happen when someone's problem is "I want to make a piece of art".

> Have we really come along way in terms of general computing? Maybe not

That's the point AK seems to be making, though. All the great things you mention are huge accomplishments, yet they're also disappointing compared to what is possible, what we should have now. Rome wasn't built in a day, but you have this whole army of Rome builders who decided that it's better to sell bricks instead of building the city...

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

#139

Post by TeMPOraL »

scroot wrote: post #108
dkarl wrote: post #94

If people could understand what computing was about, the iPhone would not be a bad thing. But because people don’t understand what computing is about, they think they have it in the iPhone, and that illusion is as bad as the illusion that Guitar Hero is the same as a real guitar. That’s the simple long and the short of it. Some kids learn guitar. Some kids fantasize about learning guitar. Apple makes machines that en…

The topic is Apple because the interviewer is a journalist who was writing a book about the iPhone. Plenty of other resources online show him praising work he likes (Bret Victor, for example) and systems that he thinks are in the right direction. It just wasn't in the bounds of the interview topic. As for the "not turning all readers into writers," well, what can we say? One would hope that all readers are literate e…

In particular, even though we don't expect all literate people to produce professional-quality writing, we do hope they can use their writing skills to solve their own problems. Be it filling forms, writing letters, posting "lost cat" messages on trees, whatever.

That's what I think computing should be. Giving people ability to solve even more complex problems themselves, even more effectively.

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

#140

Post by contingencies »

alankay wrote: post #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 in…

Thanks for being an inspiration to many of us, and keep up the good work.
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