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

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#641

Post by mmiller » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:50 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.)

To provide a little hope, I think it should be pointed out that the Frank project (VPRI) achieved web browsing that is compatible with the existing web protocol, using real objects. What it allowed is an extension of browsing on the web. So, it's not as if the two (good architecture and bad architecture) can't both exist in the same space, and be used at the same time. I think the key to answering your question is asking will people in the general public find the impetus to understand the limited nature of bad architecture, and (on one possible track) either use the good architecture to make the experience better, or (on another possible track) come up with a better computing/content architecture that does away with the web as we know it altogether?

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#642

Post by wslh » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #618

wslh wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is PharoNOS has a Linux running behind while the idea of SqueakNOS is to build a complete operating system via Squeak. In this way you can quickly hack it. There is a great page about these initiatives here: http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5727 BTW, prior to SqueakNOS we implemented this: http://swain.webframe.org/squeak/floppy/ (using Linux and modifying Squeak to work with SVGALib instead of X) in just…

I was going to mention QNX Demo Disk in my UNIX alternatives comment. I think I edited it out for a weak fit to the post. It was an amazing demo, though, showing what a clean-slate, alternative, RTOS architecture could do for a desktop experience. The lack of lag in many user-facing operations was by itself a significant experience. Showed that all the freezes and huge slow-downs that were "to be expected" on normal…

We implemented SqueakOS while some friends implemented SqueakNOS. I don't think they are being used anywhere but for educational purposes it is amazing that drivers and a TCP/IP stack could be implemented (and debugged!) in plain smalltalk. There was some more information here: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeaknos/2009-M...

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#643

Post by richhickey » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 5:54 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…

Without the 'idea' of data we couldn't even have a conversation about what interpreters interpret. How could it be a "really bad" idea? Data needn't be accompanied by an interpreter. I'm not saying that interpreters are unimportant/uninteresting, but they are separate. Nor have I said or implied that data is inherently meaningful.

Take a stream of data from a seismometer. The seismometer might just record a stream of numbers. It might put them on a disk. Completely separate from that, some person or process, given the numbers and the provenance alone (these numbers are from a seismometer), might declare "there is an earthquake coming". But no object sent an "earthquake coming" "message". The seismometer doesn't "know" an earthquake is coming (nor does the earth, the source of the 'messages' it records), so it can't send a "message" incorporating that "meaning". There is no negotiation or direct connection between the source and the interpretation.

We will soon be drowning in a world of IoT sensors sending context-or-provenance-tagged but otherwise semantic-free data (necessarily, due to constraints, without accompanying interpreters) whose implications will only be determined by downstream statistical processing, aggregation etc, not semantic-rich messaging.

If you meant to convey "data alone makes for weak messages/ambassadors", well ok. But richer messages will just bottom out at more data (context metadata, semantic tagging, all more data) Ditto, as someone else said, any accompanying interpreter (e.g. bytecode? - more data needing interpretation/execution). Data remains a perfectly useful and more fundamental idea than "message". In any case, I thought we were talking about data, not objects. I don't think there is a conflict between these ideas.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#644

Post by lucasArg » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:08 PM UTC

alankay1 wrote: post #560

lpalmes wrote: post #21

Hi Alan, If you are familiar with Go, what do you think about it's simplicity as a language? It's something other languages should start thinking about in their design?

"Simple" is not the main force in a good programming language

And, in your opinion, what is the _main force_ in a good programming language? Or maybe the top 3 :)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#645

Post by shkaboinka » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

I've seen similarities between your work (OOP) and that of Christopher Alexander (Patterns).

Do you have anything to say about how your/his works tie together?

(Note that Alexander's work is perhaps even more misrepresented in software than OOP has come to be).

For example, he talks a lot about how anything that is to evolve naturally, or even properly serve the human component, must be composed of living structure.

video of C.A. addressing the software community's (mis-)application of his work at OOPSLA: https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#646

Post by gnaritas » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

mdahlstrand wrote: post #609

gnaritas wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, yes, I'm hoping this is true as well hence my interest in what you said about learning to dream while awake. If you don't have any specific recommendations I'll continue researching on my own.

My personal experience is it's not as much "seeing" as "feeling" whatever I "see". Like with open eyes staring at but not looking at something, instead mentally focusing on peripheral, where the peripheral is more of an idea than the impression of photons hitting your retina. I often almost feel like I'm drawing the diagrams or interfaces I might think of, with sweeping gestures and so on. I definitely think it's som…

Sure, but most people have actual visuals when they imagine, most with color. That's where I want to get.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#647

Post by 3minus1 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:14 PM UTC

di4na wrote: post #457

randomsearch wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

General question about this figure, which I've seen before: > read 23,000 books in a lifetime As a very conservative lower bound, a person who lives to the age of 80 would have to read 0.79 books per day, from the day they were born, to reach this figure. Or, to put it another way, who has read 288+ books in the last year? I'm quite sceptical about this figure. Any thoughts as to how this might be possible? Are the p…

AS someone that read at least one book per day if not more since the age of 6, yes it is possible. I can read between 100 to 200 page per hour, depending of the book. You reach a storage and money problem fast (Ebook are a savior nowadays). And you tend to have multiple books open at the same time. How does it work? There are several strategy. First i read fast. Experience and training make you read really fast. Seco…

> In a fiction book, it is not unusual for me to not read a chapter or two because i know what will happen inside.

This is ridiculous. It doesn't count as reading if you skip whole chapters.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#648

Post by ehudla » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:16 PM UTC

alankay1 wrote: post #548

ehudla wrote: post #105

What are your thoughts on work/life balance in the computing industry? On growing older in our industry?

Try to avoid "growing old"! A big problem with the general industry is the lack of subsidized "sabbatical years" -- these are a good way to recharge and re-orient. Xerox, amazingly, used to have them for employees. But I haven't heard of any such thing recently. If you think about life as needing "renewables" then you shouldn't allow yourself to be "stripmined" (easier said than done).

I was more interested in the social critique angle. Tech is often perceived as a young men's [yes!] game.

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#649

Post by shkaboinka » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:17 PM UTC

shkaboinka wrote: post #640

alankay1 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Alan, of you are aware of DCI, what is your response to it?

It (or more specifically, Jim Coplien) claims to build on your vision of OOP, but also criticises "emergence" within the OO vision. (Personally, I think those problems are design issues apart from the OO model)

Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

#650

Post by alehander42 » Tue, Jun 21, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

alankay1 wrote: post #556

alehander42 wrote: post #359

Is syntax important? Do you imagine a future where there would be just several programming languages semantically using a lot more bidirectional "syntax skins"?

Yes.

Do you think some kind of more "flexible/fluid" syntax can help dyslexic people? Sometimes they are excellent at problem solving and architecture, but the micromanagement of syntax limits them.