11 ms·

Hacker News Highlights, the Alan Kay Edition

320 points by craigcannon 10y ago

minimaxir 10y ago
Er, the "Six Years of Hacker News Comments about Twilio" article was an admitted troll by the OP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11786464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11786464
- dang 10y ago
  Ha, definitely a mistake. Thanks for the QA :) (We use an internal chat channel to mention links for the highlight list, but also lots of other stuff that shows up on HN on a given day. Probably the streams got crossed.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
dang 10y ago
We asked Alan to do an AMA a while ago and he said yes, but having him show up to comment on the topic of a given thread is in a way even better. I thought those comments were pure gold. If you missed them, take a look. Alan and his group joining YC is the most mind-blowing thing to happen (for me) since I started working on HN. No one has influenced me more in thinking about computing, and his tireless work in talking about computing history (especially the work and culture around ARPA) is a true service. Watching his talks seems to be the only easy place to get that information, and when you start doing it it's like one of those dreams where you enter into a wing of your house that you didn't know existed. Edit: One of my dreams for HN is for this community to become active in recovering, learning, and extending the computing culture that Alan talks about, which is so much more satisfying than the morass of complexity we mostly find ourselves bogged down in.
- mej10 10y ago
  This is awesome. Thanks for putting them all together!
- brudgers 10y ago
  even better I tend to agree. The AMA format doesn't really allow for the kind of depth that Kay's top level answer to the OOP question has... ...or the same context for digesting it. I came across it when it was a day old and wondered about McCarthy's Temporal Logic and when Google didn't turn anything up I thought about requesting a link, but the asynchronous format led me to forgo the low value inquiry and I wound up spending enough time to figure out enough to temporarily sate my curiosity instead of checking likes on the Facebook.
- akkartik 10y ago
  I was actually on my way over to comment that I enjoyed his impromptu AMA on books at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165.
  - dang 10y ago
    Oh that should definitely be on the list! I'll ask Craig (current editor of the Macro) to add it. Edit: added.
- pnathan 10y ago
  Please know that your collaborations with Alan are appreciated. :-)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- wwweston 10y ago
  > it's like one of those dreams where you enter into a wing of your house that you didn't know existed. Wait. How common is this? (I've had these dreams semi-frequently over the last 3 years, but no one else I've told about them has volunteered that they've had any similar experience.)
  - paul 10y ago
    I have them fairly often. I think it's an interesting metaphor for life too -- how many parts of ourselves have we simply forgotten about?
  - mancerayder 10y ago
    The dreams must be incremental. For example, for me, dreaming about a house so big it has 'wings' is a latter-stage dream. I'm still fantasizing about the German doors from the other HN thread this week.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- asimuvPR 10y ago
  Could it be that culture chooses to exists offline and out of the boundaries of HN?
  - dang 10y ago
    Quite likely, though we may also be talking about different cultures? The one that Alan Kay mostly discusses in his talks is the ARPA culture of the 1960s, which bore fruit in the creation of the Internet and personal computing. The reason that culture exists out of the boundaries of HN is probably generational—most of its surviving members are either retired (though as Kay says, "still vital") or don't spend time on internet forums. It would be a huuuuge benefit to all of us if we could figure out a way to either get more of them onto HN or at least to make more of their work and experience accessible here.
    - asimuvPR 10y ago
      Good points. I certainly see HN as something too business focused (understandable given its roots as Startup News). For example, the community around Hackaday seems to be more to what the past generation had (personal opinion). Computer/Internet culture without hardware is missing a fairly big part. Hardware in HN is not common. There are golden bits here are be there but it does not seem to be part of the core subjects. Still, the value in this community comes from its business driven attitude. A sort of hacker 2.0 if you will. Where money is also important and a motivator. I still enjoy the place and feel it has blossomed into an unique mix of views. That itself means there is an HN culture. Not like the one you mention but borrowing from it.
      - geerlingguy 10y ago
        There are comparatively few hardware stories posted. And when you do post something hardware related, you'll have a better chance of exposure on HN; load up some keywords like IoT, Raspberry Pi, etc., and you'll see what I mean :)
        asimuvPR 10y ago
curiousgal 10y ago
I don't know why I found this heart-warming. I love HN. :')
themartorana 10y ago
On object "states" as recorded object history (snapshots in time?): "The just computed stable state is very useful. It will never be changed again -- so it represents a "version" of the system simulation -- and it can be safely used as value sources for the functional transitions to the next stable state. It can also be used as sources for creating visualizations of the world at that instant. The history can be used for debugging, undos, roll-backs, etc. "In this model -- again partly from McCarthy, Strachey, Simula, etc., -- "time doesn't exist between stable states": the "clock" only advances when each new state is completed. The CPU itself doesn't act as a clock as far as programs are concerned. This gives rise to a very simple way to do deterministic relationships that has an intrinsic and clean model of time. "For a variety of reasons -- none of them very good -- this way of being safe lost out in the 60s in favor of allowing race conditions in imperative programming and then trying to protect against them using terrible semaphores, etc which can lead to lock ups." Oh, my kingdom for atomic, history-recording (and replayable) object states! Safety existed in this fashion in the 60s!! I didn't know this, and now I'm sad. Race conditions continue to haunt us all to this day, especially as languages start supporting concurrency and parallelism primitively. (Not to mention that debugging race conditions is a nightmare - a nod to the Go language devs for making clear a race condition caused a crash in the stack trace.)
- pjmlp 10y ago
  You will be even more sad when you start researching the history of operating systems and systems programming and discover the safety that we already had in the 60's in systems like Burroughs that was destroyed by UNIX's industry adoption.
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    And MacOS and Windows and and... It's the "worse is better" approach or whatever that is called that set the 'not-quite-field' (thank you AK for this) back to where it started. To me it feels like we are in a hamster wheel of constant reinvention rather than using the software technologies of the 70ies (mainly from Xerox Parc) as a stepping stone. And whenever the methodologies break down we cry for the next framework/language/hardware platform to solve everything. I for one would love to see a refresh about what is happening to OMeta and its family of technologies developed at Viewpoint [1]. Is this still ongoing? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbwOPzxuJ0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbwOPzxuJ0s
JepZ 10y ago
Since one of my professors forced all students to learn Smalltalk I deeply respect Alan Kay. This language is so consistent and readable at the same time. Whenever I heard a story of him or saw something he had done this respect grows. But somehow I stick to code in golang in my spare time. I am afraid I will never see a language designed by Alan Kay and Ken Thompson together ;-) Thx for the HN Alan Kay Edition
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  Have you tried Pharo[0], which is trying to be a modern Smalltalk-like? There is a free online course[1] going on at the moment as well (French videos but subtitled), it's really good. [0] http://pharo.org/ http://pharo.org/ [1] https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/ https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/
  - JepZ 10y ago
    Looks interessting, but I don't like those large IDEs and the image philosophy neither. So for example I use vim instead of eclipse and I really like the golang tooling, because it is quite simple to use from a shell. What I like about Smalltalk is the language and how it is build on very few principles. The IDEs integrate well with the language but not with the system around them and have a lot of overhead :-/
    - nine_k 10y ago
      're very few principles: I suppose you're acquainted wild Scheme (Racket, Clojure) and Forth?
xufi 10y ago
Thanks Alan for the Q&A. It was great to see you giving answers and your own thoughts on aching questions we had. Glad to have you as part of HN
jcoffland 10y ago
This over the top hero worship is part of the HN culture that I just can't get behind. Alan Kay has an impressive resume but so do a lot of people on here. Political rallying behind a famous name only leads to the hangers-on getting a free ride to the top and keeps me standing far clear of the corporate world. I'm here to discuss the latest news.
- nekopa 10y ago
  But actually, according to the guidelines, this is not a news site. Anything intellectually stimulating to hackers is fair game.
  - jcoffland 10y ago
    Sorry but Alan Kay's name dropping history does not stimulate me intellectually.
    - dang 10y ago
      It's about the ideas, not the names. Though Alan is meticulous about mention the names of people who did ground-breaking work. That's part of communicating history.
    - teach 10y ago
      Then move on to a different thread. Don't demand that the rest of HN conform to your desires.
      - jcoffland 10y ago
        What's the Internet for if I cannot demand it conform to my desires?
- DanBC 10y ago
  I'm not sure why you call it over the top hero worship. > I'm here to discuss the latest news. From 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato... > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
vonnik 10y ago
Feature request: Let us follow HN users we like and have all their comments show up in a feed.
- hkmurakami 10y ago
  A friend of mine made a service that does this. (Iirc it's called HNwatcher) I follow a small number of people with it and periodically get emails about their new posts. I think some companies use it to track mentions of their company or product as well. A follow feature would be nice but this is currently filling the gap for me.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
This was already useful with him saying that Barton was a brilliant engineer. I have one paper with his name on it, sent by pjmlp, that describes his design of modern computing: https://de.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000 https://de.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000 He describes need for ALGOL-like programming languages, how they'll be implemented, training people, and early notions of hardware/software co-design. Also, touches on various aspects of ALGOL that could be turned into a CPU. Later, helps design and build one that's essentially the first, business mainframe plus the first of mostly-safe, truly-engineered computers. http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burroughs%20B-5000.htm http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr... Later, another Burroughs guy, Anderson, uses similar engineering mindset invents INFOSEC per Roger Schell who expanded on his work. Another hired by Intel puts the MMU and segments in there to give security developers a chance. All may ultimately trace to Barton's work and framework for thinking about machines from high-level to hardware. Worth highlighting and becoming more clear thanks to Kay's little remark that tells me who brains of operation probably was among many author's names I see in various places. Has Wikipedia page it turns out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Barton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Barton Note: Reading this, he may be the inventor of practical, abstract machines as computing solutions. He also taught lots of success stories in industry. Wonder what else he would've done if he stayed in industry.
- alankay1 10y ago
  Bob Barton is in a class of early computer people I don't think can be over-praised. However, just to put a caution on the hyperbole, I had been a journeyman programmer in the Air Force and then at NCAR -- the latter to work my way through the last two years of college -- and I just "didn't know anything" except how to code a little and design a little. When I got to grad school 50 years ago in 1966, I was immediately confronted by Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, the first Simula, many other things in the actual field, and especially in the ARPA community, and ... Bob Barton himself, who Dave Evans had convinced to be on the Utah faculty for a few years (something he was uncomfortable with). In any case, this was like someone going from the 10th century to the 20th century, where as Arthur C Clarke pointed out, "Advanced science resembles magic". I am quite surprised 50 years later to still feel the same way about these people, but my initial impressions have stuck. They seemed and do seem: magical. I've described Bob a little in "The Early History of Smalltalk" that I wrote for the ACM in 1993 http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/. A truly amazing character (and I should try to write a portrait of him at some point). Both the details, and especially the overall design philosophy of the Burroughs machines are worth close study. What was attempted in the B5000 and B5500 was breathtaking, and as is often the case, perhaps too much in a few places (this happened in the later Flex Machine as well, and in the much later Intel 432). At Parc in the 70s we were able to take a second pass at "higher level architectures" (and so did Bob Barton at Burroughs with the B1700) via mixing microcode with fixed functions. The Parc approach was much simpler and less comprehensive (had to work on relatively inexpensive personal computers, and we had a truly wonderful engineering mind in Chuck Thacker who was instrumental in retaining powerful ideas in a parsimonious fashion). But this hybrid turned out extremely well for a wide variety of needs to make "well-fitted-processors" for higher level languages. Part of the need for the hybrid was to tinker with various kinds of storage schemes, formats, garbage collection, swapping, etc., that were not well understood enough to be put directly into hardware (this was one of the two or three slight flaws in the B5000 scheme). I commend the "The Approach ..." (1961) paper listed above as one of the great papers in our field -- and it must be in the top two or three for max content in six pages. I should also note that Bob was a mathematician, thought like a mathematician, and designed like a mathematician -- engineering was more of a hobby for him (and not one that he always paid a lot of attention to). I had some of the same "hangups" -- including being a constant reader of everything -- and these were part of the basis of our relationship.
dirtyaura 10y ago
The "Alan Kay"-style moment of Hacker News for me was when I posted a link to article describing sendfile, tcp_nodelay and tcp_nopush. The article referred to Nagle's algorithm when describing tcp_nodelay and described the problem incorrectly. And lo and behold, Nagle itself came to enlighten the uninformed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045125
- dang 10y ago
  From later in that thread: It still bothers me that the Nagle algorithm (which I called tinygram prevention) and delayed ACKs interact so badly. Mark of a true engineer.
- noblethrasher 10y ago
  I had a similar ”Alan Kay“-style moment when Alan Kay responded to one of my comments about a year and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618736 It was my secret pride for the longest time, even though I was the one getting schooled.
- mpweiher 10y ago
  My Alan Kay moment was this, long ago on the Squeak mailing list: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/024941.html http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-... And quite frankly, that's what I've been doing...for example http://objective.st http://objective.st -> if you have a way of talking about and playing with architectural elements (mostly the connectors), the rest does pretty much fall out.
justin66 10y ago
Alan Kay's response to the Dijkstra quote was wonderful. I'd always appreciated Kay's calling out Dijkstra, but that he was amused and not angered by Dijkstra's attitude is great.
dang 10y ago
While we're at it, anybody else have a highlight they'd like us to add to that list? Either recent or old is fine.
kenko 10y ago
The idea that The Glass Bees is "little-known" is ... curious. It was republished by New York Review Books, not exactly a small little press no one's ever heard of.
- dang 10y ago
  That was my entirely-unthought-through phrase in sending the link to Craig, but I can tell you what I meant by it: I've heard of Ernst Junger and had no idea of that book. I still think it's bizarre and cool that he wrote anything like it (WWI novelist crossed with Philip K. Dick-level bizarre and cool), which is why the comment struck me as a highlight. But I think NYRB's press exists specifically to bring little-known things to light. Ivy Compton-Burnett, anyone?
syngrog66 10y ago
I am 99% confident of this, but would you clarify for us 100%: are you that Alan Kay?
- dang 10y ago
  It's definitely him. Let's not make him bother with authenticating himself. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11839876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11839876 and marked it off-topic.
  - syngrog66 10y ago
    ok, thank you!
  - alankay1 10y ago
    It's about Bob Barton, why would you mark it off topic?
    - NhanH 10y ago
      Just to clarify, dang marked the comment asking you to authenticate yourself as off topic, and subsequently removed it from your comment. Your comment is left untouched.
    - dang 10y ago
      Hi Alan. The Barton comments couldn't be more on topic! The only comment affected was the one asking you to prove that your account was really you, since we know it's you and I could just say so. If you view the overall page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836832) you'll see that the Barton thread is still at the top, where it belongs. The reason I did this was so the discussion could focus on the important thing (Barton) and not the procedural thing (how do we know you're the real Alan). This seems not to have entirely succeeded :) Background: A weakness of the comment tree model is that an off-topic reply to a top comment (like the Barton one) hangs near the top by virtue of its parent. "Detached" here means snipping a child comment away from its parent and making it a top-level comment in its own right, which then allows it to fall in rank on the page. That's what I did in this case. Whenever we do that we post a little mantra explaining what we did, along with a link to the original parent, in case anyone wants to see the previous context.
gavinpc 10y ago
Dr. Kay, if you're still following... then with singular respect and gratitude for your life-changing work and ideas, I would like to ask you one question. Is there a good way to use bad systems? Such as the web, which you describe as a “broken wheel,” lacking even a fraction of (e.g.) Englebart's vision. Or Linux, which you call “a budget of bad ideas.” (And no small budget, at that.) Or the iPad (and all common tablets, I assume), whose interface you call “brain dead.”[0] What should we do with these things? Are they dead ends? Are they good for anything? Can they not be salvaged incrementally? Here in the Hacker News community, where I am happy to see that my enthusiasm about your work and message is strongly shared, there is yet a huge amount of energy being poured into the wrong end of the low-pass filter, or, as you call it, “the world.” I know that we are not averse to learning curves, but maybe there is too much sunk cost to question what's already “working”? What should we do? One answer is to use bad systems to simulate better ones. But—when this is even feasible—it's always done at the cost of performance, and VPRI's publications make no secret of that. A proof-of-concept does not equal a product. And at any rate, most of us are not researchers. Because of this apparent dilemma, the exhiliration that I always feel when I hear you speak or read your writing is always tainted with a sense of despair. Is there any enlightened way to use today's systems (for example, as application developers), or should all of our efforts be directed at fixing (or indeed replacing) the systems themselves? Thank you again, for all that you've done and continue to do. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=28m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=28m https://archive.org/details/130124AlanKayFull https://archive.org/details/130124AlanKayFull And others. I believe that these quotes are representative and not misused out of context.
- alankay 10y ago
  I just found your comment. One answer wrt e.g. Javascript is to use it as a "machine code" and just put a whole better designed thing on top of it. Or try to get the web world to get behind Native Client or something better that allows a protected sandbox to be really developed into new facilities. Another answer is to not to go back to Engelbart, but to at least start with large ideas like his, and try to think of the Internet and Personal Computing as something much more than a convenience -- but more as a "lifter" of humanity. What would that mean? Another ploy would be to simply think about what is needed close to the end-users and to follow that back towards the plug in the wall (one hint is that there is no need to encounter a 60s style "operating system" -- so what would be much better in a real Internet universe?) The main heuristic is to posit "I don't really know what I'm doing, and I'm not a strong enough thinker, and 'You can't learn to see until you admit you are blind, and etc." This is my starting place for trying to do real thinking i.e. we aren't as smart as we need to be -- so we have to put real work and method into thinking and design. Tony Hoare had a good observation. He said that debugging is harder than programming, so don't use all your abilities in programming, or you'll never get the program working. We can extend that into design. Design is difficult, but being able to assess one's designs is even harder -- leave something in reserve to avoid simply making things because we can.

320 points by craigcannon 10y ago

Er, the "Six Years of Hacker News Comments about Twilio" article was an admitted troll by the OP. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11786464 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11786464

dang 10y ago
Ha, definitely a mistake. Thanks for the QA :) (We use an internal chat channel to mention links for the highlight list, but also lots of other stuff that shows up on HN on a given day. Probably the streams got crossed.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

dang 10y ago

We asked Alan to do an AMA a while ago and he said yes, but having him show up to comment on the topic of a given thread is in a way even better. I thought those comments were pure gold. If you missed them, take a look. Alan and his group joining YC is the most mind-blowing thing to happen (for me) since I started working on HN. No one has influenced me more in thinking about computing, and his tireless work in talking about computing history (especially the work and culture around ARPA) is a true service. Watching his talks seems to be the only easy place to get that information, and when you start doing it it's like one of those dreams where you enter into a wing of your house that you didn't know existed. Edit: One of my dreams for HN is for this community to become active in recovering, learning, and extending the computing culture that Alan talks about, which is so much more satisfying than the morass of complexity we mostly find ourselves bogged down in.

mej10 10y ago
This is awesome. Thanks for putting them all together!
brudgers 10y ago
even better I tend to agree. The AMA format doesn't really allow for the kind of depth that Kay's top level answer to the OOP question has... ...or the same context for digesting it. I came across it when it was a day old and wondered about McCarthy's Temporal Logic and when Google didn't turn anything up I thought about requesting a link, but the asynchronous format led me to forgo the low value inquiry and I wound up spending enough time to figure out enough to temporarily sate my curiosity instead of checking likes on the Facebook.
akkartik 10y ago
I was actually on my way over to comment that I enjoyed his impromptu AMA on books at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11803165.
- dang 10y ago
  Oh that should definitely be on the list! I'll ask Craig (current editor of the Macro) to add it. Edit: added.
pnathan 10y ago
Please know that your collaborations with Alan are appreciated. :-)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
wwweston 10y ago
> it's like one of those dreams where you enter into a wing of your house that you didn't know existed. Wait. How common is this? (I've had these dreams semi-frequently over the last 3 years, but no one else I've told about them has volunteered that they've had any similar experience.)
- paul 10y ago
  I have them fairly often. I think it's an interesting metaphor for life too -- how many parts of ourselves have we simply forgotten about?
- mancerayder 10y ago
  The dreams must be incremental. For example, for me, dreaming about a house so big it has 'wings' is a latter-stage dream. I'm still fantasizing about the German doors from the other HN thread this week.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
asimuvPR 10y ago
Could it be that culture chooses to exists offline and out of the boundaries of HN?
- dang 10y ago
  Quite likely, though we may also be talking about different cultures? The one that Alan Kay mostly discusses in his talks is the ARPA culture of the 1960s, which bore fruit in the creation of the Internet and personal computing. The reason that culture exists out of the boundaries of HN is probably generational—most of its surviving members are either retired (though as Kay says, "still vital") or don't spend time on internet forums. It would be a huuuuge benefit to all of us if we could figure out a way to either get more of them onto HN or at least to make more of their work and experience accessible here.
  - asimuvPR 10y ago
    Good points. I certainly see HN as something too business focused (understandable given its roots as Startup News). For example, the community around Hackaday seems to be more to what the past generation had (personal opinion). Computer/Internet culture without hardware is missing a fairly big part. Hardware in HN is not common. There are golden bits here are be there but it does not seem to be part of the core subjects. Still, the value in this community comes from its business driven attitude. A sort of hacker 2.0 if you will. Where money is also important and a motivator. I still enjoy the place and feel it has blossomed into an unique mix of views. That itself means there is an HN culture. Not like the one you mention but borrowing from it.
    - geerlingguy 10y ago
      There are comparatively few hardware stories posted. And when you do post something hardware related, you'll have a better chance of exposure on HN; load up some keywords like IoT, Raspberry Pi, etc., and you'll see what I mean :)
      - asimuvPR 10y ago

curiousgal 10y ago

I don't know why I found this heart-warming. I love HN. :')

themartorana 10y ago

On object "states" as recorded object history (snapshots in time?): "The just computed stable state is very useful. It will never be changed again -- so it represents a "version" of the system simulation -- and it can be safely used as value sources for the functional transitions to the next stable state. It can also be used as sources for creating visualizations of the world at that instant. The history can be used for debugging, undos, roll-backs, etc. "In this model -- again partly from McCarthy, Strachey, Simula, etc., -- "time doesn't exist between stable states": the "clock" only advances when each new state is completed. The CPU itself doesn't act as a clock as far as programs are concerned. This gives rise to a very simple way to do deterministic relationships that has an intrinsic and clean model of time. "For a variety of reasons -- none of them very good -- this way of being safe lost out in the 60s in favor of allowing race conditions in imperative programming and then trying to protect against them using terrible semaphores, etc which can lead to lock ups." Oh, my kingdom for atomic, history-recording (and replayable) object states! Safety existed in this fashion in the 60s!! I didn't know this, and now I'm sad. Race conditions continue to haunt us all to this day, especially as languages start supporting concurrency and parallelism primitively. (Not to mention that debugging race conditions is a nightmare - a nod to the Go language devs for making clear a race condition caused a crash in the stack trace.)

pjmlp 10y ago
You will be even more sad when you start researching the history of operating systems and systems programming and discover the safety that we already had in the 60's in systems like Burroughs that was destroyed by UNIX's industry adoption.
- m_mueller 10y ago
  And MacOS and Windows and and... It's the "worse is better" approach or whatever that is called that set the 'not-quite-field' (thank you AK for this) back to where it started. To me it feels like we are in a hamster wheel of constant reinvention rather than using the software technologies of the 70ies (mainly from Xerox Parc) as a stepping stone. And whenever the methodologies break down we cry for the next framework/language/hardware platform to solve everything. I for one would love to see a refresh about what is happening to OMeta and its family of technologies developed at Viewpoint [1]. Is this still ongoing? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbwOPzxuJ0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbwOPzxuJ0s

JepZ 10y ago

Since one of my professors forced all students to learn Smalltalk I deeply respect Alan Kay. This language is so consistent and readable at the same time. Whenever I heard a story of him or saw something he had done this respect grows. But somehow I stick to code in golang in my spare time. I am afraid I will never see a language designed by Alan Kay and Ken Thompson together ;-) Thx for the HN Alan Kay Edition

vanderZwan 10y ago
Have you tried Pharo[0], which is trying to be a modern Smalltalk-like? There is a free online course[1] going on at the moment as well (French videos but subtitled), it's really good. [0] http://pharo.org/ http://pharo.org/ [1] https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/ https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/
- JepZ 10y ago
  Looks interessting, but I don't like those large IDEs and the image philosophy neither. So for example I use vim instead of eclipse and I really like the golang tooling, because it is quite simple to use from a shell. What I like about Smalltalk is the language and how it is build on very few principles. The IDEs integrate well with the language but not with the system around them and have a lot of overhead :-/
  - nine_k 10y ago
    're very few principles: I suppose you're acquainted wild Scheme (Racket, Clojure) and Forth?

xufi 10y ago

Thanks Alan for the Q&A. It was great to see you giving answers and your own thoughts on aching questions we had. Glad to have you as part of HN

jcoffland 10y ago

This over the top hero worship is part of the HN culture that I just can't get behind. Alan Kay has an impressive resume but so do a lot of people on here. Political rallying behind a famous name only leads to the hangers-on getting a free ride to the top and keeps me standing far clear of the corporate world. I'm here to discuss the latest news.

nekopa 10y ago
But actually, according to the guidelines, this is not a news site. Anything intellectually stimulating to hackers is fair game.
- jcoffland 10y ago
  Sorry but Alan Kay's name dropping history does not stimulate me intellectually.
  - dang 10y ago
    It's about the ideas, not the names. Though Alan is meticulous about mention the names of people who did ground-breaking work. That's part of communicating history.
  - teach 10y ago
    Then move on to a different thread. Don't demand that the rest of HN conform to your desires.
    - jcoffland 10y ago
      What's the Internet for if I cannot demand it conform to my desires?
DanBC 10y ago
I'm not sure why you call it over the top hero worship. > I'm here to discuss the latest news. From 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato... > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

vonnik 10y ago

Feature request: Let us follow HN users we like and have all their comments show up in a feed.

hkmurakami 10y ago
A friend of mine made a service that does this. (Iirc it's called HNwatcher) I follow a small number of people with it and periodically get emails about their new posts. I think some companies use it to track mentions of their company or product as well. A follow feature would be nice but this is currently filling the gap for me.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

This was already useful with him saying that Barton was a brilliant engineer. I have one paper with his name on it, sent by pjmlp, that describes his design of modern computing: https://de.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000 https://de.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000 He describes need for ALGOL-like programming languages, how they'll be implemented, training people, and early notions of hardware/software co-design. Also, touches on various aspects of ALGOL that could be turned into a CPU. Later, helps design and build one that's essentially the first, business mainframe plus the first of mostly-safe, truly-engineered computers. http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burroughs%20B-5000.htm http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr... Later, another Burroughs guy, Anderson, uses similar engineering mindset invents INFOSEC per Roger Schell who expanded on his work. Another hired by Intel puts the MMU and segments in there to give security developers a chance. All may ultimately trace to Barton's work and framework for thinking about machines from high-level to hardware. Worth highlighting and becoming more clear thanks to Kay's little remark that tells me who brains of operation probably was among many author's names I see in various places. Has Wikipedia page it turns out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Barton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Barton Note: Reading this, he may be the inventor of practical, abstract machines as computing solutions. He also taught lots of success stories in industry. Wonder what else he would've done if he stayed in industry.

alankay1 10y ago
Bob Barton is in a class of early computer people I don't think can be over-praised. However, just to put a caution on the hyperbole, I had been a journeyman programmer in the Air Force and then at NCAR -- the latter to work my way through the last two years of college -- and I just "didn't know anything" except how to code a little and design a little. When I got to grad school 50 years ago in 1966, I was immediately confronted by Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, the first Simula, many other things in the actual field, and especially in the ARPA community, and ... Bob Barton himself, who Dave Evans had convinced to be on the Utah faculty for a few years (something he was uncomfortable with). In any case, this was like someone going from the 10th century to the 20th century, where as Arthur C Clarke pointed out, "Advanced science resembles magic". I am quite surprised 50 years later to still feel the same way about these people, but my initial impressions have stuck. They seemed and do seem: magical. I've described Bob a little in "The Early History of Smalltalk" that I wrote for the ACM in 1993 http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/. A truly amazing character (and I should try to write a portrait of him at some point). Both the details, and especially the overall design philosophy of the Burroughs machines are worth close study. What was attempted in the B5000 and B5500 was breathtaking, and as is often the case, perhaps too much in a few places (this happened in the later Flex Machine as well, and in the much later Intel 432). At Parc in the 70s we were able to take a second pass at "higher level architectures" (and so did Bob Barton at Burroughs with the B1700) via mixing microcode with fixed functions. The Parc approach was much simpler and less comprehensive (had to work on relatively inexpensive personal computers, and we had a truly wonderful engineering mind in Chuck Thacker who was instrumental in retaining powerful ideas in a parsimonious fashion). But this hybrid turned out extremely well for a wide variety of needs to make "well-fitted-processors" for higher level languages. Part of the need for the hybrid was to tinker with various kinds of storage schemes, formats, garbage collection, swapping, etc., that were not well understood enough to be put directly into hardware (this was one of the two or three slight flaws in the B5000 scheme). I commend the "The Approach ..." (1961) paper listed above as one of the great papers in our field -- and it must be in the top two or three for max content in six pages. I should also note that Bob was a mathematician, thought like a mathematician, and designed like a mathematician -- engineering was more of a hobby for him (and not one that he always paid a lot of attention to). I had some of the same "hangups" -- including being a constant reader of everything -- and these were part of the basis of our relationship.

dirtyaura 10y ago

The "Alan Kay"-style moment of Hacker News for me was when I posted a link to article describing sendfile, tcp_nodelay and tcp_nopush. The article referred to Nagle's algorithm when describing tcp_nodelay and described the problem incorrectly. And lo and behold, Nagle itself came to enlighten the uninformed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045125

dang 10y ago
From later in that thread: It still bothers me that the Nagle algorithm (which I called tinygram prevention) and delayed ACKs interact so badly. Mark of a true engineer.
noblethrasher 10y ago
I had a similar ”Alan Kay“-style moment when Alan Kay responded to one of my comments about a year and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618736 It was my secret pride for the longest time, even though I was the one getting schooled.
mpweiher 10y ago
My Alan Kay moment was this, long ago on the Squeak mailing list: http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-October/024941.html http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-... And quite frankly, that's what I've been doing...for example http://objective.st http://objective.st -> if you have a way of talking about and playing with architectural elements (mostly the connectors), the rest does pretty much fall out.

justin66 10y ago

Alan Kay's response to the Dijkstra quote was wonderful. I'd always appreciated Kay's calling out Dijkstra, but that he was amused and not angered by Dijkstra's attitude is great.

dang 10y ago

While we're at it, anybody else have a highlight they'd like us to add to that list? Either recent or old is fine.

kenko 10y ago

The idea that The Glass Bees is "little-known" is ... curious. It was republished by New York Review Books, not exactly a small little press no one's ever heard of.

dang 10y ago
That was my entirely-unthought-through phrase in sending the link to Craig, but I can tell you what I meant by it: I've heard of Ernst Junger and had no idea of that book. I still think it's bizarre and cool that he wrote anything like it (WWI novelist crossed with Philip K. Dick-level bizarre and cool), which is why the comment struck me as a highlight. But I think NYRB's press exists specifically to bring little-known things to light. Ivy Compton-Burnett, anyone?

syngrog66 10y ago

I am 99% confident of this, but would you clarify for us 100%: are you that Alan Kay?

dang 10y ago
It's definitely him. Let's not make him bother with authenticating himself. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11839876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11839876 and marked it off-topic.
- syngrog66 10y ago
  ok, thank you!
- alankay1 10y ago
  It's about Bob Barton, why would you mark it off topic?
  - NhanH 10y ago
    Just to clarify, dang marked the comment asking you to authenticate yourself as off topic, and subsequently removed it from your comment. Your comment is left untouched.
  - dang 10y ago
    Hi Alan. The Barton comments couldn't be more on topic! The only comment affected was the one asking you to prove that your account was really you, since we know it's you and I could just say so. If you view the overall page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836832 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11836832) you'll see that the Barton thread is still at the top, where it belongs. The reason I did this was so the discussion could focus on the important thing (Barton) and not the procedural thing (how do we know you're the real Alan). This seems not to have entirely succeeded :) Background: A weakness of the comment tree model is that an off-topic reply to a top comment (like the Barton one) hangs near the top by virtue of its parent. "Detached" here means snipping a child comment away from its parent and making it a top-level comment in its own right, which then allows it to fall in rank on the page. That's what I did in this case. Whenever we do that we post a little mantra explaining what we did, along with a link to the original parent, in case anyone wants to see the previous context.

gavinpc 10y ago

Dr. Kay, if you're still following... then with singular respect and gratitude for your life-changing work and ideas, I would like to ask you one question. Is there a good way to use bad systems? Such as the web, which you describe as a “broken wheel,” lacking even a fraction of (e.g.) Englebart's vision. Or Linux, which you call “a budget of bad ideas.” (And no small budget, at that.) Or the iPad (and all common tablets, I assume), whose interface you call “brain dead.”[0] What should we do with these things? Are they dead ends? Are they good for anything? Can they not be salvaged incrementally? Here in the Hacker News community, where I am happy to see that my enthusiasm about your work and message is strongly shared, there is yet a huge amount of energy being poured into the wrong end of the low-pass filter, or, as you call it, “the world.” I know that we are not averse to learning curves, but maybe there is too much sunk cost to question what's already “working”? What should we do? One answer is to use bad systems to simulate better ones. But—when this is even feasible—it's always done at the cost of performance, and VPRI's publications make no secret of that. A proof-of-concept does not equal a product. And at any rate, most of us are not researchers. Because of this apparent dilemma, the exhiliration that I always feel when I hear you speak or read your writing is always tainted with a sense of despair. Is there any enlightened way to use today's systems (for example, as application developers), or should all of our efforts be directed at fixing (or indeed replacing) the systems themselves? Thank you again, for all that you've done and continue to do. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=28m https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=28m https://archive.org/details/130124AlanKayFull https://archive.org/details/130124AlanKayFull And others. I believe that these quotes are representative and not misused out of context.

alankay 10y ago
I just found your comment. One answer wrt e.g. Javascript is to use it as a "machine code" and just put a whole better designed thing on top of it. Or try to get the web world to get behind Native Client or something better that allows a protected sandbox to be really developed into new facilities. Another answer is to not to go back to Engelbart, but to at least start with large ideas like his, and try to think of the Internet and Personal Computing as something much more than a convenience -- but more as a "lifter" of humanity. What would that mean? Another ploy would be to simply think about what is needed close to the end-users and to follow that back towards the plug in the wall (one hint is that there is no need to encounter a 60s style "operating system" -- so what would be much better in a real Internet universe?) The main heuristic is to posit "I don't really know what I'm doing, and I'm not a strong enough thinker, and 'You can't learn to see until you admit you are blind, and etc." This is my starting place for trying to do real thinking i.e. we aren't as smart as we need to be -- so we have to put real work and method into thinking and design. Tony Hoare had a good observation. He said that debugging is harder than programming, so don't use all your abilities in programming, or you'll never get the program working. We can extend that into design. Design is difficult, but being able to assess one's designs is even harder -- leave something in reserve to avoid simply making things because we can.