Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today • Hacker News Board

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#631

Post by Chlorus » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC

mischief01 wrote: post #485

It is not unlikely that you will never get to the same league as 'the inventors'. Most people are mediocre at everything they do and will always be. Most likely that includes you. We live in a culture that doesn't just tell everyone that they can easily outgrow mediocrity, no, this culture tells people they are above it from the very start. The following advice doesn't apply to geniuses or those who can be, but it ap…

> The following advice doesn't apply to geniuses or those who can be, but it applies to the majority who will read this:

When you can figure out which is which, you might be onto something. Until then this is a very...mediocre comment.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#632

Post by panic » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

alankay wrote: post #610

richhickey wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than criti…

There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were. The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For important negotiations we don't send telegrams, we send ambassadors. This is what objects are all about, and it continues to be amazing to me that the real necessities and practical necessities…

Isn't the interpreter code itself data in the sense that it has no meaning without something (a machine) to run it? How do you avoid having to send an interpreter for the interpreter and so on?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#633

Post by fcc3 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

[Earlier](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945254) you mention "good models of processes" and [elsewhere](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940688) about model building. Which models have been the best for you? Have you read [Robin Milner](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/archive/rm135/Bigraphs-draft.pdf)? Do you consider his work to be a good foundation for processes? If not, who do you consider to give a good foundation?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#634

Post by nickpsecurity » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

panic wrote: post #509

alankay1 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One start to this is not to do "a web browser" -- or other software -- with such bad initial conceptions (see elsewhere above). There was nothing necessary about this. We have a technology in which hacks are easy and can be really easily multiplied by the billions and sent everywhere. If we translate this into the world of medicine and disease and sanitation, what should we do? How far should we go? (But it is still…

I guess I'm thinking about this from the perspective of someone trying to make a computer for the general public. How will you convince anyone to buy and use a computer that can't browse the web? (And I doubt this is a problem that will go away with time; the web is big enough that it seems unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon.)

Several companies making game consoles have done it repeatedly. Phone companies do it. People were actually buying dedicated, word processors for a while despite existence of MS Word & Internet. There's devices that only let you read books. There was one, popular computer that could only play about 5GB of music.

Seeing the patterns connecting them all? That it will be a niche market to begin with doesn't mean there's no market or it's not worthwhile.

Here's one for you given success of gaming and entertainment products: a all-in-one computer combining rapid iteration, memory safety, efficiency, and HW acceleration for common things (esp graphics); a Python or BASIC (eg DarkBASIC) designed for gaming w/ libraries for common features; a port of a game creator program plus examples & artwork to draw on; tutorials a la Realm of Racket or Land of LISP that teach you the language with successive building of game modules with increasing complexity or knowledge required; ability to live patch & debug a la LISP the games with failure isolation so no lost work or long times between runs.

Think people would buy it? Especially people new to programming who would find C++, Java, web stacks, and so on daunting with low-reward steps in the learning process? Could such a HW/SW combination be a 180 for them in motivation and learning?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#635

Post by kgr » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:19 PM UTC

alankay1 wrote: post #600

kgr wrote: post #596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In FOAM (the Feature-Oriented Active Modeler) we replace classes with Models, which are just collections of Axioms. There are pre-built Axiom types for standard things like methods and properties, but also for things like imports, exports, traits, listeners, topics, templates, actions, inner-models/classes, etc. Axioms are themselves modeled, so you can create new types as required. In the end, you still end up with…

Could you list something to read please?

https://github.com/foam-framework/foam/wiki

https://github.com/foam-framework/foam/wiki/How-FOAM-is-Diff...

https://github.com/foam-framework/foam/wiki/KeyConcepts

http://foam-framework.github.io/foam/

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#636

Post by nickpsecurity » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:22 PM UTC

alankay1 wrote: post #402

bbcbasic wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents). I am not sure what the time problem is for functional programming, but I reckon the Elm language/framework solves problems with time in a very elegant way with it's flavour of FRP and Signals. In Elm, you can play back your UI interactions in a debugger as they happened and watch the variables as they would have been!

Worth looking at Bob Balzer's EXDAMS system at Rand in the late 60s early 70s.

Google search gives a lot of gibberish on those terms. Here's the paper for anyone trying to follow-up on that comment:

https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1969/5073/00...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#637

Post by vanderZwan » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #606

vanderZwan wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way you describe music here sounds a lot like how Steve Pinker has described music: as a mental equivalent of cheesecake; something that just happens to trigger all the right reward systems (the ones based on our love of patterns and structure, and exploiting the same biological systems we use for language) but isn't necessarily nutritious itself. However, all evidence points to him being wrong about this, making…

The way you describe music here sounds a lot like how Steve Pinker has described music: as a mental equivalent of cheesecake;...isn't necessarily nutritious itself. Note that I didn't mean that in a negative way. Also, if you want to consume macro-nutrients, cheesecake is a pretty effective way to get simple carbs and dairy fat. is strongly tied to social bonding, emotions and motor systems in ways that have nothing…

Yes, sorry: I could have been more clear that the what I described was Steve Pinker's judgement, not yours.

And I tried to stay neutral towards games on purpose - I have taught game design myself ;). Having said that, a lot of real-world attempts at gamification are pretty banal carrot/stick schemes.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#638

Post by jsprogrammer » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:39 PM UTC

alankay1 wrote: post #586

jsprogrammer wrote: post #201

You say the problem with Xerox is that they were only interested in billions (instead of trillions). Should we currently be interested in quadrillions, upper trillions, or, perhaps, larger? Once we become interested in an appropriately large number, what preparations should we be taking so that we can operate at that level? Do we just start putting product out there and collect the value on the open markets, or, do w…

That was a metaphorical hyperbole to attract the attention of people who think in terms of money rather than in "basic improvements to the world". The idea is that "qualitatively changing the context in a powerful way" trivially creates enormous potential for everything (including making money).

I don't think it was hyperbole and I am being 100% serious. You make a good case that PARC contributed $35+ trillion in value, of which Xerox was only able to capture a portion.

If we extrapolate out an exponential trend from forty years ago, a quadrillion seems like it might be about right. If I'm doing my math correctly, it is only about $100k value/person. Companies will soon be doing $1 trillion in annual revenue, so an 1000x multiplier doesn't seem out of question.

I guess my question is: what needs to be done to realize, operate, and maintain the enormous potential? But, maybe it is just something that happens as a result of the changes?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#639

Post by npm83 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

alankay1 wrote: post #578

Adam-Kadmon wrote: post #116

What is the best language to learn OOP concepts ?

Good question. If we are talking "real OOP", I'm not sure these days. What do other people think? Smalltalk is very long in the tooth these days, but it is still "rather object-oriented in good ways". Erlang and its derivatives are fun and good to help that kind of thinking.

What do you think is missing from Smalltalk, and what would you expect for the "21th century Smalltalk" if there was such think?

Even though is "old", I find it extremely valuable for learning to think and reason in a pure OO fashion.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#640

Post by shkaboinka » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:49 PM UTC

alankay1 wrote: post #268

Bystroushaak wrote: post #264

I have two questions: 1. It is known that you read a lot. Do you plan to write a book? You have been a big inspiration for me and I would love to read a book from you. 2. What is your opinion about Self programming language ( http://www.selflanguage.org )? I've read „STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming“ pdf and this feels related, especially to with the Klein interpreter ( http://kleinvm.sourceforge.net/ ).

I liked Self. "Good OOP" is still waiting for a much better notion to replace the idea of a "Class"

Trygve Reenskaug (MVC inventer ) and Jim Coplien (Patterns/Hillside) developed the DCI paradigm as a way model code around the roles played by objects, rather than the concrete type (class) of each object.

video: https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Reflection-OOP-Social

PDF: http://fulloo.info/Documents/RestoringFunctionAndFormToPatte...

Website: http://fulloo.info/