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Alan Kay on Hoping That “Simple” is not “Too Simple”
- btilly 17y agoI’m guessing that this is where similar computer students with undergraduate degrees might wind up — essentially doing bricklaying in some corporate notion of architecture. "Bricklaying in some corporate notion of architecture." That is an excellent description of what a lot of software developers actually do.
- stcredzero 17y agoIt's more like plumbing, actually.
- duck 17y agoWhy doesn't Alan Kay have a blog/site?
- apu 17y agoIt's not a personal site, but he founded an institute which does really awesome work on "fundamental new computing technologies", such as creating powerful new languages and techniques for building a full software stack (from OS to user-level apps) all within 20,000 lines of code! http://vpri.org/ http://vpri.org/
- andreyf 17y agoI wish Alan had at least hinted at his partitioning of the ways “humans make and do things”. I can only think of it in terms of my undergrad curriculum (where I apparently “didn’t learn much that is good”). There’s math, which gives us many formal ways of thinking about things. That intersects with CS because most computers have trouble with the natural ambiguity of our minds. Then there’s the “Philosophy of Mathematics” or “CogSci”, which asks “what are we capable of thinking?”, or more precisely “what kind of thinking can machines do for us?”, and the practical side of that coin, which is what most of undergrad CS focuses on: hardware architecture, operating systems, networking, compiler theory, type theory, virtual machines, etc. The latter-most is the bricklaying, I get that. I suppose the compiler and language design might be architecture, and the epistemological questions might be “modeling”? But then how is epistemology split up into three sub-divisions of its own? Does this even make sense?