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It always feels like Alan Kay is wistfully talking about how there could have been an alternate future where he and his ilk would do programming and computer en

It always feels like Alan Kay is wistfully talking about how there could have been an alternate future where he and his ilk would do programming and computer engineering the "right way" and somehow the world has lost it's path. He waxes eloquent about how he enabled the genius's at Xerox PARC to do deep work and how they changed the world. I find his talks inspiring but I also find it tone deaf that he doesn't understand the situation he was in nor does he see how the world has changed. Xerox PARC was, in my opinion, a by product of top down "waterfall" like business practices that he happened to be at the apex of. For most of the rest of us, we have to get by with minimal funding and try to push ideas to an over saturated market. What really irks me is how he still has this view that somehow if all the worlds intellectuals just got together or just got funding, somehow they would come up with the next genius ideas and could deliver it to the rest of the world, like god's messengers. Here's what he missed: * Free and Open source. It's not software that's eating the world, it's free and open source software that's eating the world. Most of the worlds infrastructure runs on FOSS and we'd be living in a developer hellscape of choosing between which Apple and Microsoft crippling licensing fees we'd need to pay just to have the privilege of compiling our programs. * Git. Git has allowed project management and software sharing with ease like nothing before. Even though GitHub is a proprietary enterprise, it's created massive value to the community through it's ease of sharing. * Javascript. Write once run anywhere? Javascript is the only language that comes even close. Data representation that's portable? JSON is the only one that comes close. Javascript has it's warts but it brings the best of functional languages in a procedural languages skin. Javascript is the only reason I don't dismiss functional languages off hand, because Javascript actually makes those concepts useful. * Docker (and perhaps some WebAssembly/Javascript environment). I think we're closing in the idea that Linux boxes are the analogues of "cells", where each has their own local environment and can be composed to form larger structures. Linux images may seem bloated now but when space and compute passes a threshold of cheap/fast, it won't matter. * GPUs. Moores law is alive and well with GPUs. "Out of the box" gets you a 10x-100x speedup on algorithms ported from CPUs. I've heard of 1000x-10000x in some cases. It's not just raw performance, it's also designing data structures that work on GPUs, are more data centric and are designed for small, independent and highly parallel workloads. And I'm sure there are many more. I would add cryptocurrency but maybe that falls outside of the "programming" scope. For all his preaching, Alan Kay still doesn't "get it". If there's a billion dollar monopoly that has a small, independent research group that has no ceiling to funding and has Alan Kay as it's head, great, I'm sure they'll come up with some wonderful ideas. We don't live in that world anymore and the playing field has been leveled because of the points above and many more (maybe even more simply just because cheaper compute is available). It never really occurs to Alan Kay that maybe his type of research is not the only way. Better yet, maybe Alan Kay's style of research is gone because we've discovered better ways. If Alan Kay really wants to see the worlds next ideas birthed into existence, why isn't he at the forefront of free and open source, championing the software that enables people to his type of fundamental research? If you really want a trillion dollar ROI, invest a few million in FOSS.

gcanyon 5y ago
Write once, run anywhere: I used to demo for LiveCode https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/ at MacWorld and WWDC where I would code a basic app and build separate single-file standalones for Mac, Windows, and Linux, all while holding my breath.
bumbada 5y ago
>If Alan Kay really wants to see the worlds next ideas birthed into existence, why isn't he at the forefront of free and open source? He was, he created Smalltalk, released the source code and made it as open as it can be. You can see the source of everything. The only problem was very few people were interested on that. Most children were interested in just one thing: games(the best quality they could get). And adults wanted to run professional programs in their inexpensive machines. He just could not understand why people choose other languages, like C, that were anathema for him, but let people extract all the juice of their cheap computers in order to create and play games and also serious programs that previously only run on mainframes. As an academic with early access to "hundreds of thousand dollars per machine"(and not accounting for inflation), he was too isolated from the rest of the world to understand what happened later.
- alan-kay 5y ago
  What special access to the divine do you think you have that would encourage you to report as facts the last two sentences (which are actually quite false)? You are confusing your internal inferences with what is actually going on -- and to the extent that you feel you can tell others. If you are trying to bluff your way through -- to appear knowledgeable when you aren't and can't be -- this is a behavioral syndrome that will not serve you at all well overall.
DetroitThrow 5y ago
I really enjoyed this critique of AK, but you could really stuff docker and javascript into "portability" to include technologies that provide the same benefits to other focuses outside of application programming. Intermediate representations like LLVM and WASM, and even environments like Wine and Linux subsystem for Windows have felt like major paradigm shifts.

gcanyon 5y ago

Write once, run anywhere: I used to demo for LiveCode https://livecode.com/ https://livecode.com/ at MacWorld and WWDC where I would code a basic app and build separate single-file standalones for Mac, Windows, and Linux, all while holding my breath.

bumbada 5y ago

>If Alan Kay really wants to see the worlds next ideas birthed into existence, why isn't he at the forefront of free and open source? He was, he created Smalltalk, released the source code and made it as open as it can be. You can see the source of everything. The only problem was very few people were interested on that. Most children were interested in just one thing: games(the best quality they could get). And adults wanted to run professional programs in their inexpensive machines. He just could not understand why people choose other languages, like C, that were anathema for him, but let people extract all the juice of their cheap computers in order to create and play games and also serious programs that previously only run on mainframes. As an academic with early access to "hundreds of thousand dollars per machine"(and not accounting for inflation), he was too isolated from the rest of the world to understand what happened later.

alan-kay 5y ago
What special access to the divine do you think you have that would encourage you to report as facts the last two sentences (which are actually quite false)? You are confusing your internal inferences with what is actually going on -- and to the extent that you feel you can tell others. If you are trying to bluff your way through -- to appear knowledgeable when you aren't and can't be -- this is a behavioral syndrome that will not serve you at all well overall.

DetroitThrow 5y ago

I really enjoyed this critique of AK, but you could really stuff docker and javascript into "portability" to include technologies that provide the same benefits to other focuses outside of application programming. Intermediate representations like LLVM and WASM, and even environments like Wine and Linux subsystem for Windows have felt like major paradigm shifts.