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I think object is a very powerful idea to wrap "local" context. But in a network (communication) environment, it is still challenging to handle "remote" context

I think object is a very powerful idea to wrap "local" context. But in a network (communication) environment, it is still challenging to handle "remote" context with object. That is why we have APIs and serialization/deserialization overhead. In the ideal homogeneous world of smalltalk, it is a less issue. But if you want a Windows machine to talk to a Unix, the remote context becomes an issue. In principle we can send a Windows VM along with the message from Windows and a Unix VM (docker?) with a message from Unix, if that is a solution.

ontouchstart 10y ago
Alan, what is your view on Olive Executable Archive ?https://olivearchive.org/ https://olivearchive.org/
- alankay1 10y ago
  Their larger goals are important.
  - ontouchstart 10y ago
    Do you think they are on the right path to their larger goals?
    - alankay1 10y ago
      I think for so many important cases, this is almost the only way to do it. The problems were caused by short-sighted vendors and programmers getting locked into particular computers and OS software. For contrast, one could look at a much more compact way to do this that -- with more foresight -- was used at Parc, not just for the future, but to deal gracefully with the many kinds of computers we designed and built there. Elsewhere in this AMA I mentioned an example of this: a resurrected Smalltalk image from 1978 (off a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) that was quite easy to bring back to life because it was already virtualized "for eternity"). This is another example of "trying to think about scaling" -- in this case temporally -- when building systems .... The idea was that you could make a universal computer in software that would be smaller than almost any media made in it, so ...
      - ontouchstart 10y ago
        I agree that the "image" idea is more powerful than the "data" idea. However since PC revolution, the mainstream seemed to take on the "data" path for whatever technical or non-technical reasons. How do you envision the "coming back" of image path via either bypassing the data path or merging with it in a not so faraway future?
        alankay 10y ago
        Over all of history, there is no accounting for what "the mainstream" decides to believe and do. Many people (wrongly) think that "Darwinian processes" optimize, but any biologist will point out that they only "tend to fit to the environment". So if your environment is weak or uninteresting ... This also obtains for "thinking" and it took a long time for humans to even imagine thinking processes that could be stronger than cultural ones. We've only had them for a few hundred years (with a few interesting blips in the past), and they are most definitely not "mainstream". Good ideas usually take a while to have and to develop -- so the when the mainstream has a big enough disaster to make it think about change rather than more epicycles, it will still not allocate enough time for a really good change. At Parc, the inventions that made it out pretty unscathed were the ones for which there was really no alternative and/or no one was already doing: Ethernet, GUI, parts of the Internet, Laser Printer, etc. The programming ideas on the other hand were -- I'll claim -- quite a bit better, but (a) most people thought they already knew how to program and (b) Intel, Motorola thought they already knew how to design CPUs, and were not interested in making the 16 bit microcoded processors that would allow the much higher level languages at Parc to run well in the 80s.
        ontouchstart 10y ago
        It seems that barriers to entry in hardware innovation are getting higher and higher due to high risk industrial efforts. In the meantime barriers to entry in software are getting lower and lower due to improvement of toolings in both software and hardware. On the other hand due to the exponential growth of software dependency, "bad ideas" in software development are getting harder and harder to remove and the social cost of "green field" software innovation is also getting higher and higher. How do we solve these issues in the coming future?
- mmiller 10y ago
  The Internet Archive (http://archive.org http://archive.org) is doing the same thing. They have old software stored that you can run in online emulators. I only wish they had instructions for how to use the emulators. The old keyboards and controllers are not like today's.
  - ontouchstart 10y ago
    Here is another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203
alankay 10y ago
This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...
- ontouchstart 10y ago
  Along this line of logic, perhaps the future of AI is not "machine learning from big data" (a lot of buzz words) but computers that generate runtime interpreters for new contexts.
  - yanivt 10y ago
    When high bandwidth communication is omnipresent, is "portability" of the interpreter really something to optimize for?
    - alankay1 10y ago
      How can you find it? The association between "patterns" and interpretation becomes an "object" when this is part of the larger scheme. When you've just got bits and you send them somewhere, you don't even have "data" anymore. Even with something like EDI or XML, think about what kinds of knowledge and process are actually needed to even do the simplest things.
  - alankay 10y ago
    It's not "Big Data" but "Big Meaning"
- DigitalJack 10y ago
  It's hard for me to grasp what this negotiation would look like. Particularly with objects that haven't encountered each other. It just seems like such a huge problem. I don't really know anything at all about microbiology, but maybe climbing the ladder of abstraction to small insects like ants. There is clearly negotiation and communication happening there, but I have to think it's pretty well bounded. Even if one ant encountered another ant, and needed to communicate where food was, it's with a fixed set of semantics that are already understood by both parties. Or with honeybees, doing the communication dance. I have no idea if the communication goes beyond "food here" or if it's "we need to decide who to send out." It seems like you have to have learning in the object to really negotiate with something it hasn't encountered before. Maybe I'm making things too hard. Maybe "can we communicate" is the first negotiation, and if not, give up.

ontouchstart 10y ago

Alan, what is your view on Olive Executable Archive ?https://olivearchive.org/ https://olivearchive.org/

alankay1 10y ago
Their larger goals are important.
- ontouchstart 10y ago
  Do you think they are on the right path to their larger goals?
  - alankay1 10y ago
    I think for so many important cases, this is almost the only way to do it. The problems were caused by short-sighted vendors and programmers getting locked into particular computers and OS software. For contrast, one could look at a much more compact way to do this that -- with more foresight -- was used at Parc, not just for the future, but to deal gracefully with the many kinds of computers we designed and built there. Elsewhere in this AMA I mentioned an example of this: a resurrected Smalltalk image from 1978 (off a disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) that was quite easy to bring back to life because it was already virtualized "for eternity"). This is another example of "trying to think about scaling" -- in this case temporally -- when building systems .... The idea was that you could make a universal computer in software that would be smaller than almost any media made in it, so ...
    - ontouchstart 10y ago
      I agree that the "image" idea is more powerful than the "data" idea. However since PC revolution, the mainstream seemed to take on the "data" path for whatever technical or non-technical reasons. How do you envision the "coming back" of image path via either bypassing the data path or merging with it in a not so faraway future?
      - alankay 10y ago
        Over all of history, there is no accounting for what "the mainstream" decides to believe and do. Many people (wrongly) think that "Darwinian processes" optimize, but any biologist will point out that they only "tend to fit to the environment". So if your environment is weak or uninteresting ... This also obtains for "thinking" and it took a long time for humans to even imagine thinking processes that could be stronger than cultural ones. We've only had them for a few hundred years (with a few interesting blips in the past), and they are most definitely not "mainstream". Good ideas usually take a while to have and to develop -- so the when the mainstream has a big enough disaster to make it think about change rather than more epicycles, it will still not allocate enough time for a really good change. At Parc, the inventions that made it out pretty unscathed were the ones for which there was really no alternative and/or no one was already doing: Ethernet, GUI, parts of the Internet, Laser Printer, etc. The programming ideas on the other hand were -- I'll claim -- quite a bit better, but (a) most people thought they already knew how to program and (b) Intel, Motorola thought they already knew how to design CPUs, and were not interested in making the 16 bit microcoded processors that would allow the much higher level languages at Parc to run well in the 80s.
        ontouchstart 10y ago
        It seems that barriers to entry in hardware innovation are getting higher and higher due to high risk industrial efforts. In the meantime barriers to entry in software are getting lower and lower due to improvement of toolings in both software and hardware. On the other hand due to the exponential growth of software dependency, "bad ideas" in software development are getting harder and harder to remove and the social cost of "green field" software innovation is also getting higher and higher. How do we solve these issues in the coming future?
mmiller 10y ago
The Internet Archive (http://archive.org http://archive.org) is doing the same thing. They have old software stored that you can run in online emulators. I only wish they had instructions for how to use the emulators. The old keyboards and controllers are not like today's.
- ontouchstart 10y ago
  Here is another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155203

alankay 10y ago

This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...

ontouchstart 10y ago
Along this line of logic, perhaps the future of AI is not "machine learning from big data" (a lot of buzz words) but computers that generate runtime interpreters for new contexts.
- yanivt 10y ago
  When high bandwidth communication is omnipresent, is "portability" of the interpreter really something to optimize for?
  - alankay1 10y ago
    How can you find it? The association between "patterns" and interpretation becomes an "object" when this is part of the larger scheme. When you've just got bits and you send them somewhere, you don't even have "data" anymore. Even with something like EDI or XML, think about what kinds of knowledge and process are actually needed to even do the simplest things.
- alankay 10y ago
  It's not "Big Data" but "Big Meaning"
DigitalJack 10y ago
It's hard for me to grasp what this negotiation would look like. Particularly with objects that haven't encountered each other. It just seems like such a huge problem. I don't really know anything at all about microbiology, but maybe climbing the ladder of abstraction to small insects like ants. There is clearly negotiation and communication happening there, but I have to think it's pretty well bounded. Even if one ant encountered another ant, and needed to communicate where food was, it's with a fixed set of semantics that are already understood by both parties. Or with honeybees, doing the communication dance. I have no idea if the communication goes beyond "food here" or if it's "we need to decide who to send out." It seems like you have to have learning in the object to really negotiate with something it hasn't encountered before. Maybe I'm making things too hard. Maybe "can we communicate" is the first negotiation, and if not, give up.