What is Actor Model lacking?
For what?
1) To become as mainstream in a general-purpose way as OOP and functional programming paradigms are. One of the problems I know is lack of composability.
2) To become your favourite approach.
Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
681–690 of 931 posts
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#682In terms of real, in use, user interfaces, what do you think are the best examples? What do you like about them?
I'm not a big fan of most UIs today (not that I was a big fan of those in the past -- but they seem generally worse in basic outlook)
Even minimalistic flat style popularised by Microsoft?
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#683Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
2nd Paragraph: How do they know they are even bits? How do they know the bits are supposed to be numbers? What kind of numbers? Relating to what? Etc
It contravenes the common and historical use of the word 'data' to imply undifferentiated bits/scribbles. It means facts/observations/measurements/information and you must at least grant it sufficient formatting and metadata to satisfy that definition. The fact that most data requires some human involvement for interpretation (e.g. pointing the right program at the right data) in no way negates its utility (we've learned a lot about the universe by recording data and analyzing it over the centuries), even though it may be insufficient for some bootstrapping system you envision.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#685I'm no doubt your biggest fan. What do you think of the Simula inventors work?
The Simula guys cannot be too highly praised, especially Nygaard.
Nygaard (along with Møller-Pedersen) later designed the Beta language. A very fine "object oriented" language that tried to unify the concepts of classes, procedures and structures into "patterns". Seemed like a far better language than C++, Java etc. but it never quite took off. I wonder if it "lost" because a) it was not brashly promoted by an American company or b) it used (# ... #) instead of { ... } :-)
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good insights -- and check out Alex Warth's "Worlds" paper on the Viewpoints site -- this goes beyond what PIE could do with "possible worlds" reasoning and computing ...
This is a very interesting paper. Its invocation of state space over time as a model of program side effects reminds me of an idea I had a couple years ago: if you think of a program as an entity in state-space where one dimension is time, then "private" object members in OO-programming and immutable values in functional programming are actually manifestations of the same underlying concept. Both are ways to create f…
And you get to use "relational" and "relativity" side by side in a discussion.
A lot of interesting things tend to happen when you introduce invariants, including "everything-is-a" invariants. Everything is a file, everything is an object, everything is a function, everything is a relation, etc.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#687What 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.
Smalltalk and Lisp (via CLOS) would still be my top two choices... haven't come across anything better yet.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#688Many mainstream programming tools feel to be moving backwards. For example, Saber-C of the 1980s allowed hot-editing without restarting processes and graphical data structures. Similarly, the ability to experiment with collections of code before assembling them into a function was advance. Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?
Yes. I think they have been slowly getting better. Visual Studio has let you do hot code editing for over a decade now, they call it "Edit and Continue"[0]. Only works for some languages (C#, Visual Basic/C++). It also lets you modify the program state while stopped on a break-point with code of your devising. Most browsers also let you adhoc compose and run code without modifying the underlying programs. Thanks to h…
BASIC also did this on pretty much every microcomputer in the 1980s.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#689Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It's worth thinking about what scales and what doesn't scale so well. For example, names are relatively local conventions. We could expect to have to find better ways to describe resources, or perhaps "send processes rather than messages". Think about what's really interesting about the way Parc used what became Postscript instead of trying to define a file format for "documents" for printers ... (a programming langu…
Thanks, Alan. I guess sometimes is hard to think about that level of scaling when working on the industry... or at least in projects that are not that massive.
I assume your are talking in the lines of "call by meaning" when you mention that names are relatively local, right?
As for "send processes rather than messages", isn't that what objects are about?
I mean...sending the real thing, not just "data" as part of a message. That reminds me of the Burroughs 220 and "delivering video + codec together" example you mention in your talks.
Re: Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's worth thinking about what scales and what doesn't scale so well. For example, names are relatively local conventions. We could expect to have to find better ways to describe resources, or perhaps "send processes rather than messages". Think about what's really interesting about the way Parc used what became Postscript instead of trying to define a file format for "documents" for printers ... (a programming langu…
Thanks, Alan. I guess sometimes is hard to think about that level of scaling when working on the industry... or at least in projects that are not that massive. I assume your are talking in the lines of "call by meaning" when you mention that names are relatively local, right? As for "send processes rather than messages", isn't that what objects are about? I mean...sending the real thing, not just "data" as part of a…
Modularity is: what is the minimum you need to know to make use of a module, and what is the minimum that a module needs to know to help you?
Making this good is one of the secrets of scaling