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

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

#91

Post by ssivark »

AlchemistCamp wrote: post #37
d_tr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A first-class programming language (not an LLM) to talk to the computer's OS along with a rich library is the most important missing component IMO. Humans communicate mainly with language and no OS provides this in a satisfactory way for the average user. The result is users mostly clicking on signs to choose among predetermined tasks, like monkeys in a lab.

There are things about human language that are fundamentally at odds with effective communication with a computer (or engineering in general). One example is ambiguity. Every human language has faculties for ambiguity, which is crucial in many human interactions and relationships. The ability to make implicit requests or suggestions while maintaining plausible deniability is valuable, even in situations that are non-…

> In contrast, when communicating with an OS or engineering a mechanical device, ambiguity is a negative and it's crucial to use language that is deterministic.

Very much a historical artifact. Modern systems (LLMs, for example) can in principle handle ambiguous inputs.

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

#92

Post by infinite8s »

coldtea wrote: post #71
runevault wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to my mind at least part of the issue here is human communication languages are fundamentally lossy by nature. Everything has too many meanings and requires inference. This is why when able to communicate with code it gets so much easier because it has to be exactly right or the computer fails. And at least because it is consistent we can debug and fix that communication and once that is done it will work with reason…

That describes a limitation of computers (and current interfaces to them) though. Requiring humans to describe stuff "unambiguosly" is the easy cop out to that. Getting computers to handle the ambiguity and resolve it as good as humans is what would be really amplifying. LLMs are a good step to that, compared to a regular programming language/interface.

It's also a limitation of human-human communication, and why nation's have ambassadors (who presumably have a shared context from which to start from when dealing with a foreign nation).

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

#93

Post by infinite8s »

morphle wrote: post #83
linguae wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The dream isn't dead, a number of people are working on it. Several live systems are demonstrated in talks on Youtube. There are several working systems and even a real OS with native device drivers on modern bare hardware. You can run legacy code under its qemu sandbox, but that is added only to broaden its appeal to customers as this part is not 'live'.

Sadly the work from the STEPS project seems to have disappeared, especially the Frank software he used in some talks. That looks like it would have been very interesting to play with.

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

#94

Post by Rochus »

pholbrook wrote: post #90
Rochus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

This is an outstanding paper; one of my favorites in all of computing. Read it and marvel at all that Kay has been part of.

Too much (self) marketing for my taste; I much prefer this one: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3386335 (Ingalls, 2020, The evolution of Smalltalk: from Smalltalk-72 through Squeak)

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

#95

Post by infinite8s »

DonHopkins wrote: post #32
justin66 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He actively answers questions on Quora and those answers come in a format (short length - though his are unusually well thought out - and narrow focus) that is easy to browse.

I think Quora is "a poor imitation of old static text media" that's difficult to browse and not very accessible, since it takes so much clicking and waiting to open up "more" buttons and follow replies and threads, and is impossible to easily print, or just scroll, skim, and search through, so I collected Alan Kay's answers, some discussion we had, plus some more discussion with David Rosenthal (who developed NeWS wi…

Agreed about the Quora interface. I have a Jupyter notebook that scrapes all of Alan's answers and comments into a json database - he's answered a lot of questions!

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

#96

Post by infinite8s »

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…

Bret Victor's DynamicLand seems to be a direct descendent of many of these ideas. RealTalk's reactive DB combines Linda tuplespace ideas with LISP 71 pattern matching and reactive semantics. Each Realtalk object is self contained and can't be 'messed with' externally. It's all introspective and reconfigurable, etc

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

#97

Post by morphle »

infinite8s wrote: post #93
morphle wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dream isn't dead, a number of people are working on it. Several live systems are demonstrated in talks on Youtube. There are several working systems and even a real OS with native device drivers on modern bare hardware. You can run legacy code under its qemu sandbox, but that is added only to broaden its appeal to customers as this part is not 'live'.

Sadly the work from the STEPS project seems to have disappeared, especially the Frank software he used in some talks. That looks like it would have been very interesting to play with.

I have most of the Frank/STEPS code still running. I posted a lot about it before on HN.

Yes, its a lot of fun to play with it, I invite people to join in the fun. 20.000 Lines of code for almost all of personal computing.

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

#98

Post by falcor84 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #81
vasco wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And that's a good thing, because computer solutions should be task specific Why? I enjoyed your comment but I don't follow why this is obvious? Why should computer solutions be task specific rather than general?

So that when you ask what 1+1 is you get 2 and not a general solution

Why not both?

If I were making an API call, I'd want to get 2, but as an end user, I'd be delighted in "It's 2 and here's how I arrived at it ...'

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

#99

Post by kragen »

infinite8s wrote: post #96
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…

Bret Victor's DynamicLand seems to be a direct descendent of many of these ideas. RealTalk's reactive DB combines Linda tuplespace ideas with LISP 71 pattern matching and reactive semantics. Each Realtalk object is self contained and can't be 'messed with' externally. It's all introspective and reconfigurable, etc

yes, agreed. you may or may not be aware that bret was a principal investigator at yc harc, along with vi hart, dan ingalls, john maloney, yoshiki ohshima (who posted this video), and alex warth, at least three of whom were at vpri. yc harc was sorta kinda headed by alan kay https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/harc

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

#100

Post by kragen »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #69
angiosperm wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

he might not appreciate us pretending we know what he thinks ;)
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