6 ms·

This video of him from 1996 is amazing with hindsight. A must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA RI

This video of him from 1996 is amazing with hindsight. A must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA RIP Christopher Alexander

gjvc 5y ago
OOPSLA talks of that era were fantastic. Alan Kay has often paid tribute to Christopher Alexander in his talks and I cannot resist mentioning this from Alan from the following year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
- seumars 5y ago
  Too bad Kay has never paid enough tribute to Nygaard and Dahl in the same manner. His comments from that '97 OOPSLA talk on Simula being incomprehensible are absurdly misleading.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    will investigate. any and all pointers welcome.
    - seumars 5y ago
      Simula67 was already known in academic circles by the early 70s. Donald Knuth had first taken an interest in Simula I after a visit in Oslo but couldn't manage to bring it to Stanford because of the very high licensing fees the Norwegian Computing Center were charging for it. That first iteration of the language was more focused on being a general purpose "system description" language for different kinds of real-life simulations (this would also kickstart Nygaards work on the social impact of technology and the beginnings of user-oriented system development, then participatory design). Simula67 however wasn't the "incomprehensible" language that Kay describes. The second iteration was much more focused and had all the elements of modern object-oriented patterns: classes, subclasses and inheritance, objects, object references and attributes, object dot notation, polymorphism, etc. So Kay's take on Simula being this strange language he had to "make sense of" for his work on Smalltalk, or even the fact he claims he coined the term "object-oriented" is total BS. Here's a more nuanced and impartial account of Simula by James Gosling, if you want to know more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRtIdlTqlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRtIdlTqlU.
pmoriarty 5y ago
This is very interesting, but his main concerns (the creation of what he calls "living structures", "nurturing structures", and things that make people "feel whole") seem to be completely and utterly divorced from what people in the computer field are interested in.
- smiley1437 5y ago
  Yes, I wonder what he felt about how some of the most well-compensated members of our society spend their efforts on building software that gets people to click on ads
- jdougan 5y ago
  Sounds a lot closer to developing in an image based system (Smalltalk/Lisp Machine/Classical block based Forth/EMACS etc.)
- Khelavaster 5y ago
  These structures are akin to residual neural net motifs. "Fine-grained control at every level" is the name of the game. Pattern Languages are languages which obey the roughly same algebras as residual neural nets in context of transfer learning. Looks more closely at what Christopher Alexander says!!

This video of him from 1996 is amazing with hindsight. A must watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA RIP Christopher Alexander

gjvc 5y ago

OOPSLA talks of that era were fantastic. Alan Kay has often paid tribute to Christopher Alexander in his talks and I cannot resist mentioning this from Alan from the following year https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

seumars 5y ago
Too bad Kay has never paid enough tribute to Nygaard and Dahl in the same manner. His comments from that '97 OOPSLA talk on Simula being incomprehensible are absurdly misleading.
- gjvc 5y ago
  will investigate. any and all pointers welcome.
  - seumars 5y ago
    Simula67 was already known in academic circles by the early 70s. Donald Knuth had first taken an interest in Simula I after a visit in Oslo but couldn't manage to bring it to Stanford because of the very high licensing fees the Norwegian Computing Center were charging for it. That first iteration of the language was more focused on being a general purpose "system description" language for different kinds of real-life simulations (this would also kickstart Nygaards work on the social impact of technology and the beginnings of user-oriented system development, then participatory design). Simula67 however wasn't the "incomprehensible" language that Kay describes. The second iteration was much more focused and had all the elements of modern object-oriented patterns: classes, subclasses and inheritance, objects, object references and attributes, object dot notation, polymorphism, etc. So Kay's take on Simula being this strange language he had to "make sense of" for his work on Smalltalk, or even the fact he claims he coined the term "object-oriented" is total BS. Here's a more nuanced and impartial account of Simula by James Gosling, if you want to know more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRtIdlTqlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccRtIdlTqlU.

pmoriarty 5y ago

This is very interesting, but his main concerns (the creation of what he calls "living structures", "nurturing structures", and things that make people "feel whole") seem to be completely and utterly divorced from what people in the computer field are interested in.

smiley1437 5y ago
Yes, I wonder what he felt about how some of the most well-compensated members of our society spend their efforts on building software that gets people to click on ads
jdougan 5y ago
Sounds a lot closer to developing in an image based system (Smalltalk/Lisp Machine/Classical block based Forth/EMACS etc.)
Khelavaster 5y ago
These structures are akin to residual neural net motifs. "Fine-grained control at every level" is the name of the game. Pattern Languages are languages which obey the roughly same algebras as residual neural nets in context of transfer learning. Looks more closely at what Christopher Alexander says!!