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This answer is amazing and classically Alan Kay! There's so much here to unpack because of all the different areas Alan draws from in his work (he's like a comp
by skadamat 3y ago
This answer is amazing and classically Alan Kay! There's so much here to unpack because of all the different areas Alan draws from in his work (he's like a computing philosopher).
All I will say is that for people who want to understand his perspective, there's a large epistemological load to overcome. Sampling his talks is a good starting point though: https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay
- agomez314 3y agowow this list is super useful, thanks for sharing!
- layer8 3y agoHe always criticizes how everyone got computing wrong (fair enough), but never offers anything but the most vague suggestions of how to do things differently.
- detourdog 3y agoI think trustability is pretty specific and without a foundation of trust the rest of the effort”s value is unknowable.
- layer8 3y agoThat’s “what we would like to have” (so mostly just a criticism that we don’t have it), but without much of a suggestion of how to actually achieve it in practice.
- detourdog 3y agoThe current industry leaders of the effort want to proclaim that it is impossible to know where the answers come from. If that is the industry norm then I understand how achieving trustability could be mysterious. My line of thinking is that without an audit trail of thoughts there won't be any trustability. I'm unable to describe in detail what any one specific thing leads to trustability. I can say that being able to demonstrate where answers come from would work for me.
- theGnuMe 3y agoTrue message passing is one of the key ideas behind smalltalk which would improve computer security considerably. This is analogous to the design of the internet that he references. The internet scales well. So imagine building entire computing systems this way.
- vajrabum 3y agoIf smalltalk is late binding and message passing, I think it's interesting that modern large scale webapps (say Netflix or Google) do just that just not inside process and server boundaries. I'd guess that Alan Kay would think that's a bastardization, and there are loads of complications but it's a definite improvement over the large php ball of mud monolith you might have seen at say Box or Facebook 10-15 years ago. Because the 'object' boundaries are so coarse you can also better leverage the few people inside an org who know how to design, scale, improve robustness and secure systems. If architecture is the metaphor, it's still pretty much piling mud bricks but at least there are corbeled arches, streets, city walls, public buildings and a rudimentary notion of style. As for LLMs I think that long form typeahead is the right way to think about it.
- fzzzy 3y agoI don't think he would think it is a bastardization. HTTP is 100% message passing. You have an object reference (url) and you pass a message to it with POST. State and behavior is encapsulated. In fact, one of the desireable properties of message passing is that it is easy to distribute across process and machine boundaries.
- layer8 3y agoHow would it improve it, though? Dynamically-typed languages tend to introduce gradual typing after a while to increase reliability and predictability, and the end game of that (static typing) is the antithesis of late binding. Message passing only improves security by adding a validation layer, but managed languages (JVM, CLR, etc.) effectively do the same. > The internet scales well. So imagine building entire computing systems this way. That’s very similar to microservices, and look how messy these tend to get. The internet scales well because it’s a network with flexible capacity and attached processing power, and because its clients are either human users who can deal with failure modes, or software with stable and well-specified point-to-point protocols.
- sebastianconcpt 3y agoHe did tho. He mentioned more than once that OOP was more about message passing than behavior + state.
- layer8 3y agoYes, that’s what I mean by vague suggestions. How do you actually build and maintain a system of any complexity with that? How do you ensure it will do what it is supposed to do? And Smalltalk wasn’t that, it is mostly just regular method calls and not “message passing”.
- Xelynega 3y agoErlang(and more modernly elixir/Gleam) are an example of this in practice, and were created to make it easier to ensure the working and manage the complexity of large systems.
- layer8 3y agoFair enough. But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo.
- MisterTea 3y agoMaybe because there is no one/right/simple answer. You really have to think for yourself and seek out answers instead of expecting them. You're doing that now but with the mistaken impression you were to be handed them.
- asdajksah2123 3y agoIf he said "use Erlang" then that eliminates the actual message he's trying to convey, which is message passing is good. I bet if he simply said "use Erlang", 99% of headlines and discussion would be "Alan Kay said Erlang is the greatest language evah!" I do appreciate that he respects his audience, ie me, enough that he thinks we can read "message passing is good" and go from there to choosing a message passing language that is suitable for our needs, or even using a non message passing language due to other factors, but recognizing that OOP is about message passing and not state encapsulation, which would impact how I code even in Java.
- mempko 3y agoWhat? He literally built systems that did things differently. Look at smalltalk.
- agumonkey 3y agoI think I get what parent means, Kay is mostly seen in conference mode, with simplified slides and big ideas, it's frustrating if you never saw who he got taught or worked with.
- carapace 3y agoYou are impressively wrong. He just wrapped up an incredible research program that demonstrated many concrete implementations of great computing ideas. > After 16 years of continuous research and important contributions toward its mission - "Improve 'powerful ideas education' for the world's children and to advance the state of systems research and personal computing" - Viewpoints Research Institute concluded its operations at the beginning of 2018. http://www.vpri.org/ http://www.vpri.org/
- layer8 3y agoAnd what exactly is the output, other than talks and some programming learning tools for children? I haven't seen any significant new insights or advances.
- carapace 3y ago> And what exactly is the output, other than talks and some programming learning tools for children? The papers and demos are the output. They were a research outfit, not a startup. OP claimed that Kay "never offers anything but the most vague suggestions" when he (et. al.) provided several very concrete working demos. It's hardly his fault if no one took him up on them, is it? (FWIW I suspect some of their work had an effect on MS Word & Excel UI but I don't know for sure.) > I haven't seen any significant new insights or advances. Where have you looked? Did you read the papers that VPRI published? OMeta has been mentioned else-thread, I like that Nile programming language, the COLA system seems neat.
- joshmarinacci 3y agoHis entire 60 year career is a suggestion of how to do things differently. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
- vinnyvichy 3y agoEventually, after distancing themselves from their curmudgeonly creator, his ideas land in the mainstream. I'm convinced, eg, that what's loved about python has been elucidated by AK at some point, but maybe it's even good marketing not to attribute anything to him ;)
- agumonkey 3y agoone real experiment he contributed to was VPRI ometa and the os built on top of that (every part of the OS built on top of an eDSL)
- fmap 3y agoOthers have already mentioned this, but Alan Kay spent his entire career experimenting with approaches to radically simplify computing. The progress reports from vpri give a good overview of a recent project that has since wrapped up, e.g.: https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2012001_steps.pdf https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2012001_steps.pdf
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago>> Others have already mentioned this, but Alan Kay spent his entire career experimenting with approaches to radically simplify computing. Yes. And yet, he created OOP [1]. Strange. ________________ [1] Not on his own.
- jdlshore 3y agoYou’re saying this like it’s a “gotcha,” which makes me believe you’re confusing OOP-as-practiced-in-enterprise with OOP-as-invented-by-Kay. The sad truth is that most great ideas are doomed to drown in a sea of mediocrity and misinterpretation.
- YeGoblynQueenne 3y agoI'm not confusing anything. OOP is a horribly OOT over-engineering of a problem looking for a solution, from the get go. That it morphed and twisted into a bloated mess when it was taken up by people who didn't get it to begin with is just the inevitable result of starting with a big pile of no need to do all that in the first place.
- Phiwise_ 3y ago[Citation Needed]
- Osmose 3y agoHe has generally great insights about principles to aim for, which is part of the answer, but no, he does not have the entire answer. His insights are inspiration for others who contribute their own parts to potential answers—that's how open collaboration works.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KorematsuFredt 3y agoI wish someone could provide a tl;dr of that answer to us simpletons. His writing style is something I am unable to comprehend.