Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

youtube.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 145 posts

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#61

Post by bobajeff »

kragen wrote: post #41
angiosperm wrote: post #40

There are sound reasons why no substantial system in common use is coded in Smalltalk. Kay could have spent the decades since his time at PARC figuring out why, and remedying them. One of the reasons is that O-O is just one of several important ways discovered to organize software. Any big enough problem will have places for each. Specialization is for insects.

you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did some substantial research into some of the other important ways to organize software, including things like array languages, david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and cooperating communities of specialized solvers. in this talk, he also mentioned gelernter's tuple-space architecture, though you may have missed it. he definitely isn't a…

>you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did some substantial research into some of the other important ways to organize software, including things like array languages, david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and cooperating communities of specialized solvers.

I'm very interested in knowing what array languages they were researching. The only thing I can find is Nile[1] but from the examples it doesn't look like an array language to me.

[1] https://github.com/damelang/nile

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#62

Post by wtetzner »

hasmanean wrote: post #42
nanna wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be cool to be able to just click on anything and adjust its code to however you like it. I guess that Smalltalk and its descendants allow this. But so does Emacs. It's not an operating system, but it covers a lot of the use-cases.

You would need live routing of messages. And the ability to reroute, filter, inject messages dynamically into code. Why must everything be done as a function call? You can’t change anything without recompiling the code. Today everything is implemented as a function call. Need to send a message? Call a function named “snd_msg” or something.

> Why must everything be done as a function call? You can’t change anything without recompiling the code.

Emacs Lisp supports dynamic binding, so you can dynamically rebind function definitions at runtime.

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#63

Post by wwweston »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #54
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because computers are dumb servants. And that's a good thing, because computer solutions should be task specific. The human has agency and sometimes imagination, and the computer's job is to solve a problem as transparently as possible with as little cognitive load as possible. Human language is optimised for human relationships , not for task-specific problem solving. It's full of subtext, context, and implic…

Yes, the machine should be a humanity-amplifier, not a humanity-replacement. “Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” Frank Herbert, Dune

Herbert is describing a humanity amplifying phenomenon.

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#64

Post by kragen »

bobajeff wrote: post #61
kragen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did some substantial research into some of the other important ways to organize software, including things like array languages, david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and cooperating communities of specialized solvers. in this talk, he also mentioned gelernter's tuple-space architecture, though you may have missed it. he definitely isn't a…

>you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did some substantial research into some of the other important ways to organize software, including things like array languages, david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and cooperating communities of specialized solvers. I'm very interested in knowing what array languages they were researching. The only thing I can find is Nile[1] but from…

nile was the thing i was thinking of, yes

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#66

Post by kragen »

skadamat wrote: post #18
nanna wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Live in what sense? To me Emacs fits the bill, or at least a subset thereof.

With a live programming model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding

yeah, that's one of the main things people like about emacs

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#67

Post by melvinroest »

skadamat wrote: post #13

I wish we had a popular operating system for end users like ourselves that was “live” all the way down. It’s unfortunate we’ve been stuck with Windows, Mac, and Linux only

One could repurpose Pharo for this, I think. I'm not entirely sure how the environment would be an "at the OS level thing" but it should be doable to have a basic OS that basically boots a Pharo environment and then that's your OS.

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#68

Post by melvinroest »

linguae wrote: post #39
skadamat wrote: post #13

I wish we had a popular operating system for end users like ourselves that was “live” all the way down. It’s unfortunate we’ve been stuck with Windows, Mac, and Linux only

I have the same dream. A part of me wishes Richard Stallman set out on making a Lisp OS instead of making a Unix clone, but this was the mid-1980s and thus I understand the technical limitations and the social environment of the time. The 1990s could’ve been a better time; workstations and commodity PCs were powerful enough to run an entire Lisp or Smalltalk operating system, and there would’ve been substantial inter…

Apply to YC for fun and see if they'll fund you. It's a long shot due to the non-commercial nature. But who knows? If you do, include me in it. I'm not the best OS dev, but I do know Pharo. I'm up for making a YC application if you are! ;-)

My email is in my profile if you'd want to entertain this idea.

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#69

Post by zelphirkalt »

angiosperm wrote: post #43
kragen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did some substantial research into some of the other important ways to organize software, including things like array languages, david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and cooperating communities of specialized solvers. in this talk, he also mentioned gelernter's tuple-space architecture, though you may have missed it. he definitely isn't a…

And static type calculus as seen in the MLs, Haskell, and lately C++.

Pretty sure he would appreciate it for the guarantees those come with, but criticize them for being dead programs, that are not alive like for example the internet, one of his examples for systems, that started and from that moment on have not been taken offline to be changed.

Re: Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

#70

Post by coldtea »

boxfire wrote: post #4

The idea of computing as the shared stage to reflect our own intelligence is really what sticks out to me as the best way to frame what interacting with a computer means. It's not new but Alan did a great job of motivating and framing it here. Thanks for posting this great reminder that what we use as computers today are still only poor imitations of what could truly be done if we can transport our minds to be more d…

>The idea of computing as the shared stage to reflect our own intelligence

We tried that, and it worked briefly. But the end result is the modern web/app landscape: commercialization, tits and cats, hating, techo-feudal and government control, partisanship bs, spam, narcisism - and rare sprinkles of intelligence here and there.

Post reply on HN