Alan Kay is still waiting for his dream to come true • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by yqwsqw » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 11:25 AM UTC

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…

Well, he could implement the Dynabook. Why should others do it for him?

Sounds like a lot of hand-waving to me.

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

#152

Post by pepijndevos » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 11:49 AM UTC

alankay wrote: post #145

austenallred wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People often ask me "Is this a Dynabook, is that a Dynabook?". Only about 5% of the idea was in packaging (and there were 2 other different packages contemplated in 1968 besides the tablet idea -- the HMD idea from Ivan, and the ubiquitous idea from Nicholas). Almost all the thought I did was based on what had already been done in the ARPA community -- rendered as "services" -- and resculpted for the world of the chi…

It seems to me the Raspberry Pi people have put out a lot of good work making hard things possible and transforming education.

The video you posted reminded me about some of the work of Bret Victor, especially his interactive environments in his video on "inventing on principle". Although what's missing there is the ability to connect and modify the environment itself.

I still have to think a bit more about your link to Montessori, who has been a great inspiration for the school ( http://aventurijn.org ) that my parents started. Also in relation to what you said about teaching real math. Montessori has this system with beads and other countable cubes and pies to teach things like multiplying fractions, that is not used in most schools that call themselves "Montessori schools".

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

#153

Post by icebraining » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 12:05 PM UTC

c3d wrote: post #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…

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,

Interesting phrasing, considering that the iPhone did not come with the App Store. In fact, Apple's was the third software distribution platform to be released for iOS, after Installer.app and Cydia.

Meanwhile, Alan Kay was working in Croquet[1] - a project that allows the creation of multi-user collaborative software with live-editing and automatic distribution and replication - since at least 2001.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

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

#154

Post by samim » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 12:13 PM UTC

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…

Dear Alan: Your views & ideas expressed in this interview are spot-on. Gives us food for thought for the next 50 years. Thank you!

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

#155

Post by db48x » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 1:05 PM UTC

hamilyon2 wrote: post #128

Animats wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Most of what OOP is used for is to implement the thousands of minor details that go into implementing a complex system. Peruse the Firefox source code some time; you'll find a large class hierarchy of different types of strings, and another one for different types of DOM nodes, and another for different types of documents that the nodes belong to, another for windows of various types, another for various types of images that it can decode, etc. None of that has anything to do with modelling entities in the real world.

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

#156

Post by db48x » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 1:07 PM UTC

ZenoArrow wrote: post #148

digi_owl wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

OLPC and Firefox OS are not examples of projects that pushed the idea of an OS and application stack that could be understood by a single person. To get a better idea of what Alan Kay has been working towards I'd recommend checking out the STEPS project.

I'd say that they were the closest in recent memory.

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

#157

Post by dTal » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 1:11 PM UTC

firasd wrote: post #25

johansch wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is terrible though. It is worth stating the obvious fact once in a while. This organic design of the web stack with layer upon layer upon layer upon layer can't go on for forever. At some point it will just become too painful and an alternative will emerge.

The web platform has its virtues though. I can still load a webpage made in 1996 and at least read the text if nothing else; we can't say the same of erstwhile competitors like Flash, Silverlight, Java applets...

"Can still read text 20 years later" is a pretty low bar. What are the odds the javascript will work?

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

#158

Post by imtringued » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 2:44 PM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #59

ktRolster wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Right now the problem is that the horse doesn't even know that water even exists so unless it happens to find it through dumb luck or talks to someone other horse about it's problem it won't ever find water to even consider drinking it.

The idea is that the AI takes over the role of the other horse.

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

#159

Post by imtringued » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 2:51 PM UTC

p1esk wrote: post #96

runevault wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure if there's a problem at all. Learning how to do anything is much easier today than ever. Just type "how to do X" in google, and you will probably see a nice YouTube video, or a tutorial. If you get stuck, there are online forums with people willing to help for free, 24/7. Has the number of people who want to learn decreased? If so, was it because of iPhones/iPads?

When I do that I constantly think why is it so difficult to learn things? Why do I need to look at least 3 different sources just to confirm that they are not bullshitting me?

After learning one thing related to the topic I want to learn I still have 99 to learn but I don't even know what those 99 things are. So basically I'm learning through dumb luck. Yes the reason is that I haven't reached the magical "bootstrap knowledge" where you have enough information in your head to just look up the things I don't know.

Those youtube videos are nice and all but they will barely teach you anything, they are easy to consume low quality crap for lazy people. I know that because I'm one of them.

The fundamental problem is still the same. Discoverability sucks. I still have to ask someone who is more knowledgeable than me. So why not let the AI do that task?

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

#160

Post by ZenoArrow » Sun, Sep 17, 2017, 4:15 PM UTC

db48x wrote: post #156

ZenoArrow wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OLPC and Firefox OS are not examples of projects that pushed the idea of an OS and application stack that could be understood by a single person. To get a better idea of what Alan Kay has been working towards I'd recommend checking out the STEPS project.

I'd say that they were the closest in recent memory.

The software for both OLPC and Firefox OS were both based on Linux. Is there anything that made them more approachable on the low level than any other Linux distro?