5 ms·
I might be wrong, but I think people like Alan Kay and Christopher Alexander have in common that they: * see that things can be done better (not as in upgra
by huuu 10y ago
I might be wrong, but I think people like Alan Kay and Christopher Alexander have in common that they:
* see that things can be done better (not as in upgrade but best);
* have a global idea/feeling of how this could be done;
* take a lot of ideas from nature.
And somehow I think they have a lot of trouble expressing the 'how'.
My take: we should take a good look at nature because this is closest to what we are.
For example the communication between objects could be learned from cells.
- gagege 10y ago> communication between objects could be learned from cells So, message queues? I completely agree.
- huuu 10y agoDoes queuing occur when cells communicate?
- gagege 10y agoSort of. AFAIK, cells basically just send out signals and the nearest available cell with a compatible protein that can "read" the signal picks it up.
- huuu 10y agoWell I asked because lets say queuing does not occur, then you might want to design a system that can send and receive messages in without queue.
- gagege 10y agoDefinitely. Designing a system where the order of procedures is not certain would be a very interesting challenge and could be very useful.
- TickleSteve 10y ago...that would be a function call (if synchronous) and a simple event in the asynchronous case.
- mercer 10y agoThat sounds more event-based, no? The cells trigger events, and the compatible proteins are listeners.
- kmiroslav 10y agoNothing wrong with looking at nature and trying to get inspiration from it (e.g. neural nets) but ever since we realized that flight was easier to implement with chemical combustion than by flapping wings, we know that just because something works in nature doesn't mean it will be easy to replicate for human use.
- huuu 10y agoTrue. But because as today it's easier to implement doesn't mean we won't have aircraft with flapping wings in the future.
- jdmichal 10y agoWe probably won't, at least not at human-scale and not on Earth. Flapping wings don't scale; there's a reason you have to get to #12 of the heaviest birds list to get one that flies, at ~13% the maximum mass of the heaviest bird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_birds#Table_of_heaviest_living_birds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_birds#Table_of...
- DigitalJack 10y agoI wonder where pterodactyls would fall on that scale.
- jdmichal 10y agoLooks like Wikipedia has us covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur_size#Speculation_about_pterosaur_size_and_flight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur_size#Speculation_abo... From the references, this is a pretty good read: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-pterosaurs-first-took-flight/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-pterosaurs-fir...
- greghendershott 10y agoMaybe they're reluctant to pick "the" how, too soon. If you're in a field from the early days, you probably have more of a pioneer or explorer mentality. Later come settlers, who pick areas for utility. Even later come residents, born and raised there, most of whom don't really question what is given. This probably seems weird and frustrating to the explorers -- why settle so soon? Yes it seems comfortable and convenient, here, but there is so much left to explore. That's how I understand Alan Kay. He doesn't want to sell us some snazzy next big thing. He wants more of us to spend more time imagining and trying new things.
- Dangeranger 10y agoAlan was a Molecular Biology major in college and has stated before that the basis for OO messages was originally inspired by cellular communication: > I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages (so messaging came at the very beginning -- it took a while to see how to do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful).