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

171–180 of 297 posts

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

#171

Post by shalabhc »

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…

> See what you think about what happens around 9:05

I saw two interesting things around 9:05. A 13 year old made an 'active essay' on the computer which contains not just text but also a dynamic interactive environment so the reader can follow along and even try out new ideas. This type of media is not prevalent today - essays written by 13 year olds today would be in Google/Word docs and contain only static text and static pictures (i.e. digitized paper), but no interactivity. There are ways to do interactivity today, of course, but they are not easy and not the default. Is this what you are getting at?

The other interesting thing is how two tools - the drawing tool and animation tool - are made to work together, even when they were not created with each other in mind. IIUC the image is not a file format here but an object, but don't both tools then need to work with the same image protocol? I suppose you can always have adapters to connect different image protocols, but it doesn't seem like the best option. Still thinking about how much (or how little) shared knowledge is needed to make this scale to all types of objects.

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

#172

Post by coldtea »

alankay1 wrote: post #169
coldtea wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One question for Alan, if he's reading on (and of course thanks for decades of great work and inspiration). Do you think that your criticism against passive consumption etc might be incompatible not just with how things like modern computers and platforms are designed, but also with how most people are wired to behave? That is, that it's not just that our tools constrain us to being passive consumers but that we also…

One perspective on this is to think about your definition of "civilization" and compare it with both "human universals" and what we know about the general lives of hunter-gatherers and the extent that we can use this to guess about the several hundred thousand years before agriculture. Many of the things on my list for "civilization" are not directly in our genes or traditional cultures: reading and writing, deductiv…

Thank you for the reply.

I think you hit the nail on the head -- even though making the distinction between what people "want" and "deserve" is not very popular in the US (or where I live and anywhere else for that matter) at the moment (or even since the 70s or so).

Despite all the self-improvement books and seminars and everything, the norm is that people should just be given what they want, and not anything harder but that can potentially make them better and more creative. In fact a person would be labelled "elitist" to dare suggest anything else -- e.g. that universities are not just vocational schools for getting the skills for one's future job, or that technology should not just be about what Joe Public is capable of mastering, but about advancing Joe and Jane public.

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

#173

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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

>> Why is object oriented programming so popular of it doesn't meet needs of software it helped to write?

Perhaps because the vast majority of programmers learn to program in an OOP language first, and then find it very hard to learn a different paradigm. Or maybe they have very little time to do so.

I think this leads right back to the point alankay1 is making (if I got it right): that given a hammer and sufficient time, you become a hammerer; someone who can hammer nails and can't do much else.

So asking "why is OOP so popular" is a bit like asking "why do people watch Holywood movies" (i.e., if they're not good cinema). That's what they're used to.

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

#174

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

>> And Apple has really doubled down on ease of use, at the expense of everything else wonderful about having a powerful computing device you can hold in one hand. To the point where it's become just like regular, can't-talk-back-to-it television.

Worse, actually. At least those old TV sets didn't spy in on your intimate conversations, neither did they keep track of your whereabouts and generally spy in on you. Your phone, does.

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

#175

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

>> 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.

I find that a valid rebuff of a "skeptic" (on quotes). A true skeptic should know their shit, first and better than anyone they care to er, skepticise.

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

#176

Post by norswap »

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…

"it was a proof of concept, not a commercial product"

Within that distinction, lies dragons.

The issues I have with existing systems are divided in two categories: bugs/issues/not being polished enough, and conceptual inadequacy.

Most of my issues with actual products fall within the first bucket, because the second bucket actually means I'd want another product. This is where innovation is.

That being said, unlike Kay, I don't loathe what we have. I'd be very happy if it was just better. But, like him, I thin the fact it's bad has deep roots in the way it is conceived.

I think another commenter hit the nail on the head when he said that Kay was mostly disappointed with users.

About Steps specifically, I haven't tried it out, but I harbor a lot of doubt. A huge amount of work goes into making stuff merely tolerable.

Something I do have experience with is Pharo Smalltalk (which I believe is the most advanced offering in the market). In theory, having your own small universe based on coherent principle is heaven. In practice, it feels very constricting to work inside that box (the Smalltalk image), because you don't have access to some of your best power tools, or even to some basic modern niceties.

(Pharo Smalltalk and great, and improving steadily, you should try it out. But I don't see myself calling myself a Smalltalk developer/hacker any time soon.)

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

#177

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

>> 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.

Those things don't sound particularly creative to me [at least not to the extent you can actually do them on a phone] and you don't need an iPhone to do them, either.

Isn't it more the case that kids (and everyone else) are naturally creative and Apple marketing somehow latched on to this as a way to push their devices upon as many people as possible?

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

#178

Post by astrange »

zmix wrote: post #125
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.

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 p…

Finder does have tabs, and further automation is available through scripting (AppleScript and Terminal).

Actually, both scripting and the commandline are effective ways of making you organize your program into nouns and verbs that can be extended by the user.

But I don’t think rearranging the basic UI is that useful, because all your users are basically the same - we’re all human and not Lisp programmers.

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

#179

Post by zmix »

Alan Kay comes from a time, when IT business was all about the creation of tools. The companies forming out of the 60's/70's experiments, of which he was a main protagonist, would drive the innovation according to more abstract needs of information management. That era ended in the 2000's.

The companies, who drive techical advancement and innovation now, are a shopping mall, some telocs, family camps with added spying bonus, and often any form of information gatherers, that do business by the worst part of our economy, selling image rather than delivering identity. I am talking about the advertisement business.

Alone, compare the Windows 10 address book to former installations. Back in the old days, the addressbook was scriptable. You could query it from other apps. Some third party apps had powerful filtering. And now? It is totally dumbed down to the most basic, primitive needs. And while we use cloud based addressbooks these days, it is much more difficult to keep them neat and ordered. I could go on for hours. Like XHTML vs HTML5 and so on.

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

#180

Post by db48x »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #160
db48x wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I say that they were the closest, not that they were complete implementations of the vision.

Firefox OS had a particularly hackable UI layer. You could install webpages as if they were apps (all assets stored locally), bypassing the need to get your app into a curated store. Writing new drivers in Javascript could have come later.

Post reply on HN