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For those who are unaware, this was headed by Alan Kay and was researching various concepts in human-computer interaction, including ideas about the future of coding ( http://www.vpri.org/work/ifnct.htm ). It's a real shame to see them close up shop, we need that kind of research to continue.
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This group blew up very suddenly, leaving a lot of unfinished work. They didn't even properly release the work they had done on GitHub or someplace similar. It's just not like Alan Kay to do that. https://awarth.blogspot.com/ Note that Warth's name is missing from the 2012 STEPS report. Piumarta went to Japan. There's something we don't know. For a bit of follow-on, there is Alex Warth's homepage: http://www.tinlizzi…
I had a brief look at Alan Kay's most recent comments here - but couldn't find much about VPRI in particular - I was hoping maybe there'd been some post mortem that I'd missed - but doesn't appear so: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=alankay
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I know of a 10 room mansion in Tuscany, Italy that could house a group of future of coding researchers for a year, starting in September. It would work out to €500/month for room and board. But would anyone be up for it?
I'm interested, and building something like that in Hawaii.
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Is it true that they never achieved it? I thought they basically did. You can see the system in action in various talks by Alan Kay.
They did basically achieve it. There's one missing component though: the kernel. One big reason kernels have to be gigantic nowadays is the stupidly high diversity of hardware interfaces. Every USB device, every graphics card, network card, printer… has its own peculiar way of talking to the rest of the computer, and that shorcoming has to be compensated by bolting a driver on top. For each OS . See Casey Muratory on…
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Compared with other popular European countries, Italy is cheap. But I don't know if it's that cheap.
The room is €200; €300 was back-of-the-napkin for general meals and it could be low, but when you buy in bulk it can be quite inexpensive and Italy is definitely cheap.
Would love to spend my time somehow funded, even minimally, to build the crazy ideas that I believe in and think could actually matter, instead of the much less interesting or important work of my day-job. But I suppose that's most of us here on HN.
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This group blew up very suddenly, leaving a lot of unfinished work. They didn't even properly release the work they had done on GitHub or someplace similar. It's just not like Alan Kay to do that. https://awarth.blogspot.com/ Note that Warth's name is missing from the 2012 STEPS report. Piumarta went to Japan. There's something we don't know. For a bit of follow-on, there is Alex Warth's homepage: http://www.tinlizzi…
HARC also seemed to end suddenly. I was never able to get any details on why.
Dang. I used to look forward to the 20KLOC OS/GUI/IDE. I guess they never really achieved that. Maybe it was just time for Alan Kay to retire.
So while they never achieved the incredibly ambitious goal of everything in 20kloc, or doing it exactly how he wanted to, I think they showed it could be done (at least within that order of magnitude.) The amazing part is the incredible economy of some of the major subsystems they built.[3] Finally, they did assemble it all into a working demo. Unfortunately, without further funding that's where it ended.
[1] IIRC, it was because it was a bit of a Frankenstein solution: parts in Smalltalk, some serious hacks to the Smalltalk image, a couple of VM plugins in C for performance, parts in JavaScript, parts in various DSLs etc.
[2] All of which are publicly available including the code. While it's a bit high level and some of the concepts weren't fully fleshed out, I have managed to get some major pieces of it working with my own code so can attest to the fact that it does work and is useful as a starting point at least.
[3] The first time I really started looking under the covers of OMeta I kept wondering 'where the hell is the code?' After a while I realized that it was all there: it's one of the more amazing uses of recursion and (effectively) self-modifying code I've seen.
Dang. I used to look forward to the 20KLOC OS/GUI/IDE. I guess they never really achieved that. Maybe it was just time for Alan Kay to retire.
For those who are unaware, this was headed by Alan Kay and was researching various concepts in human-computer interaction, including ideas about the future of coding ( http://www.vpri.org/work/ifnct.htm ). It's a real shame to see them close up shop, we need that kind of research to continue.
I know of a 10 room mansion in Tuscany, Italy that could house a group of future of coding researchers for a year, starting in September. It would work out to €500/month for room and board. But would anyone be up for it?