Alan Kay on Lisp
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Alan Kay on Lisp
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Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#2Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options).
Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean it is objectively 'the best'.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#3Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options). Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean…
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Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#4I disagree with the "single ... language" right off the bat before any deeper considerations.
Lisp is a great collection of design patterns for making languages.
> The key was not so much “Lisp” but the kinds of thinking that this kind of representational approach allowed and opened up regarding all kinds of programming language schemes.
> A fun thing about it this is that once you’ve grokked it, you can think right away of better programming languages than Lisp, and you can think right away of better ways to write the meta descriptions than John did.
Once you've grokked it, those programming languages are more advanced dialects of Lisp.
Or else, you didn't really grok it.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#5it is the man himself :), and ofcourse, this p.o.v is worth 80 IQ points. this insight is
'One of our many problems with thinking is “cognitive load”: the number of things we can pay attention to at once. The cliche is 7±2, but for many things it is even less. We make progress by making those few things be more powerful.'
just beautiful
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#6Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options). Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean…
You would rather watch Transformers then Citizen Kaine? Wat?
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#7Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options). Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean…
You would rather watch Transformers then Citizen Kaine? Wat?
Actually I, too, would rather watch Transformer instead of Citizen Kaine. And I accept that later is a great film.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#8Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options). Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean…
I think the problem is that Citizen Kane was highly topical in its time, both in style and subject. If you didn't grow up watching newsreels, the parody of newsreels is not going to mean anything to you. If you aren't used to thinking about Hearst as a very powerful and controversial man, a lot of the scenes won't mean much. They make a joke about how he is starting the Spanish American War, but they don't really explain it. So I think it loses something without the context.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#9Citizen Kaine is often called 'the best movie ever made'. If you watch it, it is arguable whether it is even minimally entertaining. I would say it is one of the most influential movies created along with Kurosawa movies. If I'm stuck on a plane I would rather watch the latest Transformers or sit in silence (given only those three options). Lisp is arguably the most influential programming language, that doesn't mean…
You would rather watch Transformers then Citizen Kaine? Wat?
Attention spans are different now.
Re: Alan Kay on Lisp
#10A similar recent answer on Smalltalk: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15518746.