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Articles, videos, etc. about Alan Kay show up frequently on HN. This puzzles me. Kay seems like a peripheral figure in the history of CS. I know him mainly for

Articles, videos, etc. about Alan Kay show up frequently on HN. This puzzles me. Kay seems like a peripheral figure in the history of CS. I know him mainly for his work on Smalltalk and his iconoclastic views on trends in CS and the tech industry. Is there a consensus in the CS community that Kay is an important figure who deserves this kind of adulation? Do any of us really understand or care about his achievements? Just asking.

cconroy 10y ago
You cannot have a turing award and be a `peripheral figure` in the history of CS. And of the turing award recipients he cares most about the field reminiscent of physicists, mathematicians, geologists, etc. (Last sentence is my opinion.)
da02 10y ago
What are some people you think deserve more attention? (For me, Alan Kay is good publicist for other geniuses. He's talked about Ivan Sutherland, Neil Postman, etc. I was overlooking those people until I started watching his talks on Youtube.)
- lacampbell 10y ago
  I never knew about the Mother of all Demos before watching him either. Still amazing today.
jarmitage 10y ago
This is like reducing Doug Engelbart to 'the guy who invented the mouse'.
mjn 10y ago
He's considered important in at least two fairly central, mainstream R&D areas. One, object-oriented programming, where his development of message-passing OO and the design of Smalltalk are an influential line of thought. And two, interactive, iterative development environments, which you can think of as attempts to create a more visual, structured next-gen of the REPL paradigm. It's true that his specific outputs there (Smalltalk, Squeak, etc.) have never become that mainstream. But: 1) they have become much more widely used than a lot of other research systems (Smalltalk is not just some PhD thesis used by 3 people), and 2) being even "highly influential" on two major areas of development that are mainstream-important is a pretty high bar to clear already.
- shalabhc 10y ago
  Also, Dynabook? And the GUI? http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/laptop-invented http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/laptop-invented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_...
goatlover 10y ago
You mean if pioneering work on the object-oriented, GUI based VM that inspired Jobs and Gates and popular languages like C++, Java, Ruby, Python, etc and the proliferation of virtual machines counts a peripheral influence. The Smalltalk VM led to Sun working on the Self VM which led to the JVM.
- signa11 10y ago
  i have always felt that erlangs message passing model was a more faithful rendition of oo than others. which seems to be inspired from smalltalk...
  - nikki93 10y ago
    Yeah totally. I think to go with the biological analogies Kay makes, having them be async objs running code they message-pass to each other makes more sense to me than like methods on classes. In the latter there is still a hierarchical ontology of objects imposed top-down while in the former emergent behavior occurs bottom-up. "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" (from Kay's reading list on the Squeak website) has some interesting stuff about trying to take graphs of nodes like this and figure out a good hierarchical decomposition given emergent discovery of edges. Here's something I've been thinking about lately: what if the object edges were organized spatially like a cellular automaton, maybe we can use spatial intuitions then, and if we only allowed linear-typed resources to be passed between them we actually have conserved "flow" of these resources, allowing the use of tools from economics to study the flow. Then it ends up looking like https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/growing-artificial-societies https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/growing-artificial-societies except with programmable monadic behavior at each cell. The linear-typed resources will allow linear proofs locally at each object but the monadic programming of each will allow non-linear emergence.
lacampbell 10y ago
I'm not sure I can impartially answer this question, as I'm a great admirer of Alan Kay, and of his concept of OO, but I'll try. First thing first is that he's a pretty great talker. That ensures anyone will even take the time to listen to what he has to say. But unlike some other great talkers/writers in our field with slavish devotion, Alan Kay was part of pioneering cutting edge research into personal computing. To me he's a breath of fresh air. He's not trying to sell hocus pocus methodologies at software conferences, he's taking a holistic, big picture view of computing and offers some crazy ideas - not all of which I agree with, but most of which have some merit. His view that computing is an immature field and we don't yet know what we are doing really resonates with me. People too often try and treat it like it's something mature like the electrical engineering or mathematics that underpins it, but it's totally not. We're still in the stage where we are constantly forgetting our history because we're stuck in fashion cycles (ie, people calling Swift innovative because it takes ideas from 1970s programming languages). And he rightly shines a light on that and says hey, we can and should aim to do better. For that I applaud him. He can be a bit esoteric and out there and what he says is often not directly applicable to everyday programmers. I totally agree. But from thousand foot view strategic perspective he's well worth listening to.
aryehof 10y ago
The citation stated on his Turing award says it best: "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing." [1] [1] http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm

cconroy 10y ago

You cannot have a turing award and be a `peripheral figure` in the history of CS. And of the turing award recipients he cares most about the field reminiscent of physicists, mathematicians, geologists, etc. (Last sentence is my opinion.)

da02 10y ago

What are some people you think deserve more attention? (For me, Alan Kay is good publicist for other geniuses. He's talked about Ivan Sutherland, Neil Postman, etc. I was overlooking those people until I started watching his talks on Youtube.)

lacampbell 10y ago
I never knew about the Mother of all Demos before watching him either. Still amazing today.

jarmitage 10y ago

This is like reducing Doug Engelbart to 'the guy who invented the mouse'.

mjn 10y ago

He's considered important in at least two fairly central, mainstream R&D areas. One, object-oriented programming, where his development of message-passing OO and the design of Smalltalk are an influential line of thought. And two, interactive, iterative development environments, which you can think of as attempts to create a more visual, structured next-gen of the REPL paradigm. It's true that his specific outputs there (Smalltalk, Squeak, etc.) have never become that mainstream. But: 1) they have become much more widely used than a lot of other research systems (Smalltalk is not just some PhD thesis used by 3 people), and 2) being even "highly influential" on two major areas of development that are mainstream-important is a pretty high bar to clear already.

shalabhc 10y ago
Also, Dynabook? And the GUI? http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/laptop-invented http://online.wsj.com/ad/article/laptop-invented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_...

goatlover 10y ago

You mean if pioneering work on the object-oriented, GUI based VM that inspired Jobs and Gates and popular languages like C++, Java, Ruby, Python, etc and the proliferation of virtual machines counts a peripheral influence. The Smalltalk VM led to Sun working on the Self VM which led to the JVM.

signa11 10y ago
i have always felt that erlangs message passing model was a more faithful rendition of oo than others. which seems to be inspired from smalltalk...
- nikki93 10y ago
  Yeah totally. I think to go with the biological analogies Kay makes, having them be async objs running code they message-pass to each other makes more sense to me than like methods on classes. In the latter there is still a hierarchical ontology of objects imposed top-down while in the former emergent behavior occurs bottom-up. "Notes on the Synthesis of Form" (from Kay's reading list on the Squeak website) has some interesting stuff about trying to take graphs of nodes like this and figure out a good hierarchical decomposition given emergent discovery of edges. Here's something I've been thinking about lately: what if the object edges were organized spatially like a cellular automaton, maybe we can use spatial intuitions then, and if we only allowed linear-typed resources to be passed between them we actually have conserved "flow" of these resources, allowing the use of tools from economics to study the flow. Then it ends up looking like https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/growing-artificial-societies https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/growing-artificial-societies except with programmable monadic behavior at each cell. The linear-typed resources will allow linear proofs locally at each object but the monadic programming of each will allow non-linear emergence.

lacampbell 10y ago

I'm not sure I can impartially answer this question, as I'm a great admirer of Alan Kay, and of his concept of OO, but I'll try. First thing first is that he's a pretty great talker. That ensures anyone will even take the time to listen to what he has to say. But unlike some other great talkers/writers in our field with slavish devotion, Alan Kay was part of pioneering cutting edge research into personal computing. To me he's a breath of fresh air. He's not trying to sell hocus pocus methodologies at software conferences, he's taking a holistic, big picture view of computing and offers some crazy ideas - not all of which I agree with, but most of which have some merit. His view that computing is an immature field and we don't yet know what we are doing really resonates with me. People too often try and treat it like it's something mature like the electrical engineering or mathematics that underpins it, but it's totally not. We're still in the stage where we are constantly forgetting our history because we're stuck in fashion cycles (ie, people calling Swift innovative because it takes ideas from 1970s programming languages). And he rightly shines a light on that and says hey, we can and should aim to do better. For that I applaud him. He can be a bit esoteric and out there and what he says is often not directly applicable to everyday programmers. I totally agree. But from thousand foot view strategic perspective he's well worth listening to.

aryehof 10y ago

The citation stated on his Turing award says it best: "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing." [1] [1] http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm