11 ms·

Interview with Alan Kay

203 points by gits1225 14y ago

anigbrowl 14y ago
Excellent interview - Kay has some hard truths to tell and calls out a lot of BS.
- paganel 14y ago
  Totally agree with you, but looking at the comments above it seems like we've been imprisoned for so long in this glorious cave called the World Wide Web that we've forgot how we could have transformed the real outside world. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave)
  - filipncs 14y ago
    I think I can guess the answer, but do you think that perhaps there could be any other reason, just any at all, that people don't see it your way? Once you've started explaining away why people disagree you with that kind of rhetoric, it's really hard to learn anything from them.
    - paganel 14y ago
      > but do you think that perhaps there could be any other reason, just any at all, that people don't see it your way? Of course that I'm aware of that, I'm not that self-centered :) > Once you've started explaining away why people disagree you with that kind of rhetoric, it's really hard to learn anything from them. English is not my primary language, so I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're saying, but in case you're suggesting that I'm full of what will turn out to be empty rhetoric then of course that you have the right to your opinion. Anyway, I find it crazy that a guy like me (I think I'm in HN's bottom bracket when it comes to programming- or CS-ability) somehow sort of "defends" a guy like Alan Kay. I'm only doing it for the energy, the passion, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it that always gets to me when I'm reading Alan Kay's interviews. I agree it's something subjective.
noonespecial 14y ago
"A lot of people go into computing just because they are uncomfortable with other people. So it is no mean task to put together five different kinds of Asperger's syndrome and get them to cooperate. American business is completely fucked up because it is all about competition. Our world was built for the good from cooperation." So much insight, so few words.
- guscost 14y ago
  I think it seems so poignant because the general phenomenon has been corrupting our society for a long time. I can't imagine that this is the first time disruptive and powerful technologies have subverted the moral codes that their inventors were ostensibly upholding.
- wyclif 14y ago
  Kay may think that "American business is completely fucked up", but it's also undeniable that American business has been the greatest engine for technological progress the world has ever seen. Kay's anti-capitalism is showing, and it isn't particularly glorious to behold.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Agreed for some value of progress. Some worrying aspects. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57468103-37/apple-bows-out-of-program-for-environment-minded-products/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57468103-37/apple-bows-out...
  - kitsune_ 14y ago
    World War 1, 2 and the Cold War have been the greatest engines for technological progress the world has ever seen.
    - ekianjo 14y ago
      Ah yeah ? How do you demonstrate that? Looks like the industrial revolution had nothing to do with wars at all... strange, somehow stuff got invented anyway. I'd be very careful about making such implications that "wars are good for technology". We have seen more advances in the past 20 years in technology than any time before, yet it was already the end of the Cold war. How do you explain that??
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
ryanhuff 14y ago
If the web had proper time to incubate without the pressures of the dotcom craze, I suspect it would have developed in a much more controlled, and systematic way. As we know, development was very chaotic and competitive. I do think we will get to a better place eventually. After all, the web is still a relatively new medium, especially when compared to the "Internet".
keithpeter 14y ago
"A side note: Re-creating Kay's answers to interview questions was particularly difficult. Rather than the linear explanation in response to an interview question, his answers were more of a cavalcade of topics, tangents, and tales threaded together, sometimes quite loosely — always rich, and frequently punctuated by strong opinions. The text that follows attempts to create somewhat more linearity to the content. — ALB" Audio would be ace.
staunch 14y ago
It seems like he's still stuck thinking about computers the way he was many years ago. Wikipedia isn't amazing because it doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor and can't run code on the (very few) pages where that's even applicable? He doesn't seem to get that what makes the web amazing is the data and people connected to it. That's generally far more interesting to users than novel interfaces or whiz-bang features. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, etc aren't technically all that interesting or innovative. They're infinitely more transformative than nearly all software that came before them though.
- vosper 14y ago
  All of the companies you cite ARE technically innovative - Google created map-reduce (amongst many other things); Facebook stores, indexes and retrieve billions of images; Twitter contributed real-time graph processing (Storm) to the open-source world, and mostly solved fan-out on a massive scale; Wikipedia - well, it's Wikipedia, and it's done on a tight budget, to boot. Everyone's standing on the shoulders of giants, but the idea that the contributions of top engineers and scientists today are somehow less than those that came previously is ridiculous - Kay seems hurt that people have taken the ideas and run with them, and doesn't seem to get that not everyone's as smart as him - and that's fine, we can still have something to offer.
  - gaius 14y ago
    Google created map-reduce Only if they also created a time machine, map and reduce are there in the Common Lisp spec from '84 and doubtless pre-date that by a decade or two. mostly solved fan-out on a massive scale Well, if you mean created a poor copy of what Teknekron (now known as Tibco) were doing in '86, and they were mainly commercializing research from the '70s.
    - Dn_Ab 14y ago
      It's worth noting that the Google "MapReduce" is not type equivalent to the map (roughly 'a list -> 'b list) and reduce ('a list -> 'b) found in Lisp and functional languages. It is actually in a way, an opposite. That is, the map (roughly 'a -> 'b list) in mapreduce is actually more like the dual/opposite of reduce (unfold). And reduce is well, a complicated beast. I think - the ideas behind MapReduce are not difficult but nor are they necessarily inevitable. The innovative part of MapReduce is Google getting to a place such that the constraints force that approach as obvious. MapReduce is impressive.
bcantrill 14y ago
Alan Kay is a brilliant guy, but I really wish he could open his mouth without shooting it off. In particular -- to speak to my own domain -- he bleats about "feature creep" in an operating system with absolutely no demonstrated understanding for a modern OS. Is KVM "feature creep"? Is ZFS? Is DTrace? He shows not so much as an ounce of understanding for why these things exist or empathy with those for whom they were created. I have great reverence for history (and Kay and I share an intense love for the B5000[1]), but I also think it's a mistake to romanticize the past. Viz., when he wistfully recalls the Unix kernel having "1,000 lines of code", he can only be talking about Sixth Edition: even by Seventh Edition (circa 1979!), the kernel had (conservatively) over ten times that amount.[2] And this is still a system that lacked a VM system and TCP/IP stack -- and tossed if you created the 151st process![3] If he wants to criticize the path that history has taken, fine -- but when he is so ignorant of the specifics of that path, it's very hard to treat him as anything but a crank, albeit an eminent one. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010407 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010407 [2] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7 http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7 [3] newproc() in http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/sys/sys/slp.c http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/sys/sys/...
- konstruktor 14y ago
  I think inplicitly Kay is talking about personal computing, not servers, and that in isolation is a very narrow perspective. But following his thinking for a moment: does a 'PC' need VMs, ZFS and dtrace? Apple has shown that, by removing many things that seemed essential, like a user-visible file system, you can build a personal computer that appeals to a lot of people. I firmly believe this is not the right tradeoff to make, even for personal computing in general, but people are throwing loads of money at them...
  - sev 14y ago
    Apple doesn't "remove a user visible file system", they just make direct file system manipulation not as much of a necessity. And yet, this is not why their OS is good: it's because, if you want to, you can manipulate the file system and view it in as much detail as a BSD (OpenBSD) server, with just as much ease, combined with great hardware-software compatibility.
chris_wot 14y ago
Is this how he really said it, or was the author paraphrasing?
jorangreef 14y ago
Browsers were built around the idea of web pages, not web apps. The security model works for web pages but precludes powerful web apps. There needs to be a way for a user to grant UDP, TCP or POSIX power to a web app, because WebSockets are not TCP, and IndexedDB is not POSIX and never can be. Just UDP, TCP and POSIX and we're done. Let the community build everything better and faster on top.
nl 14y ago
If they reinvented what Engelbart, did we'd be way ahead of where we are now. I give you http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/hyperscope.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/hyperscope.html, implemented in 2006 on that horrible web thing Kay complains about. So there is that...
chris_wot 14y ago
"You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized." Actually, no. Perhaps if you are Roman Catholic (and even then that's questionable); Evangelical Christians either believe that you don't do anything to get to heaven and Jesus saves you, or you choose to believe that Jesus Christ died as one perfect sacrifice for the forgiveness of those who follow Jesus. You may not agree, but I'm pointing out that the statement by Kay is pretty inaccruate.
- jorangreef 14y ago
  There are many interpretations of what it means to follow Christ. The rational interpretation is Christ's own interpretation, the historical gospel story, from the beginning of the Old Testament right through to the end of the New Testament. The Scriptures are historical, they provide the facts of the events. Thankfully they are also theological and interpret the meaning of the events. Did it happen? What does it mean?
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Agreed - however, I was merely pointing out that Alan Kay stated that Christians believe that "You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized", which is about as far as possible from the position of such a considerable number of Christians it's unfunny! So it's not that I disagree with any assertions that there are many interpretations of what it means to follow Christ, but that I disagree that the statement was accurate for all Christians. It is my opinion that a very small minority of Christians really believe that. I realise that I've been voted down for pointing this out, but I thought it was an important viewpoint to bring forth in the discussion, given that Alan Kay made it the basis for his "Socrates should go to heaven" argument. Alan Kay might be excellent as a Computer Scientist, but his digression into the Christian religion was remarkably uninformed.
  - sp332 14y ago
    Fundamentalist radical literalist Christian here :) It's simple: when Jesus and two thieves were being crucified together, he told one of them that he would see him in paradise that day. Ergo, baptism is not a necessary requirement of getting to heaven. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%2023&version=HCSB https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%2023&v... (I would start around verse 32)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 14y ago
I fully agree with him. The web was designed for reading documents not to try to shoehorn an operating system into the browser. Thankfully the mobile world is bringing back the desktop applications concept, while using the network for communication protocols as it is supposed to be.
- dan-k 14y ago
  That's the exact opposite position from what Kay said: "...what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.... You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a mini-operating system..." Essentially he's saying that the way we think of browsers is holding the web back. We could have collaborative WYSIWYG editing of Wikipedia or blogs, for example, but instead we're stuck with just reading documents. Perhaps it would be correct to say that the web was designed for reading documents, but it shouldn't have been (at least according to Kay).
gits1225 14y ago
Why is the title of the post renamed? Should the titles be boring and dry instead of being informative one line summary of the article that people may find interesting enough to read it? Look what happened to the previous submission of the same article here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224966 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224966. Such a good article went unnoticed because the title was plain unattractive. Can we have a little bit of 'submitters freedom' here? P.S: Original title was: "Internet by Brilliant minds, Web by Amateurs, Browser a lament"
- chris_wot 14y ago
  I actually think it was a good rename. He said a lot more than that, and sensational titles aren't really needed on HN.
  - gits1225 14y ago
    I do agree on 'cheap' sensational titles, but I don't think mine was. I think it was a better title more in-line to what Alan Kay emphasized in the article, giving it a bit of context to interest someone to read a great interview, instead of just a generic 'Click Here' like the previous submitter's, leading people to think it was not worth 'clicking through'.
    - chris_wot 14y ago
      Fair comment - on further reflection I agree, the title was reasonable as it highlighted the emphasis placed by Alan Kay. It wasn't the title that was sensational, it what Alan Kay said in the interview. Apologies for suggesting otherwise!
- DennisP 14y ago
  Although the new title is bland, it got me to read it. I likely would have skipped the the original unless "Alan Kay" was in there somewhere.
  - gits1225 14y ago
haberman 14y ago
I haven't read too much Alan Kay before, but this interview made me realize that he's not really the inventor of object-orientation as we currently think of it. He says as much directly in the interview: "And that's true of most of the things that are called object-oriented systems today. None of them are object-oriented systems according to my definition. Objects were a radical idea, then they got retrograded." It sounds like his conception of "objects" is a more user-facing thing; an object is something you see on your screen and can interact with and manipulate by programming. This view blurs the line between users and programmers. I'm not sure this is a terribly realistic model for how normal people want to interact with computers. For all his disdain for the web, it has succeeded in bring content to over 2B people worldwide, most of whom wouldn't have the first idea what to do with a Smalltalk environment.
- david927 14y ago
  You need to read Alan Kay.
  - haberman 14y ago
    Maybe so, but this interview didn't really inspire me to. Almost nothing he had to say made any sense whatsoever. Wikipedia has a failure of imagination because the Logo page doesn't let you write Logo programs? What's wrong with Wikipedia being an encyclopedia and linking to some web page that is a full-on Logo programming environment? I'm not really sure what I got wrong that explains the downvotes to -3.
    - eterps 14y ago
      You're mistaking this particular example with the general idea. What he means is that computers can do so much more than displaying text based content. And he not only wants you te be able to interact with information, he wants you to be able to create that kind of interactivity without becoming a real programmer first. To give a different example than the one about Logo; imagine a Wikipedia page about a well known mathematical principle, you can explain it with text and some images, but you could have explained it just as well on paper. Instead you could explain things in ways that only a computer enables you to do, for example like this: http://worrydream.com/#!/KillMath http://worrydream.com/#!/KillMath But that still scratches the surface compared to the stuff that Alan Kay wants to be the norm. I advice you read Alan Kay's work with that in mind: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf
limist 14y ago
There's a compelling quote within the first page: But the thing that traumatized me occurred a couple years later, when I found an old copy of Life magazine that had the Margaret Bourke-White photos from Buchenwald. This was in the 1940s — no TV, living on a farm. That's when I realized that adults were dangerous. Like, really dangerous. I forgot about those pictures for a few years, but I had nightmares. But I had forgotten where the images came from. Seven or eight years later, I started getting memories back in snatches, and I went back and found the magazine. That probably was the turning point that changed my entire attitude toward life. It was responsible for getting me interested in education. My interest in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults. Here's a link to the photos (some unpublished) that he refers to: http://life.time.com/history/behind-the-picture-bourke-white-and-the-liberation-of-buchenwald/#1 http://life.time.com/history/behind-the-picture-bourke-white...

203 points by gits1225 14y ago

anigbrowl 14y ago

Excellent interview - Kay has some hard truths to tell and calls out a lot of BS.

paganel 14y ago
Totally agree with you, but looking at the comments above it seems like we've been imprisoned for so long in this glorious cave called the World Wide Web that we've forgot how we could have transformed the real outside world. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave)
- filipncs 14y ago
  I think I can guess the answer, but do you think that perhaps there could be any other reason, just any at all, that people don't see it your way? Once you've started explaining away why people disagree you with that kind of rhetoric, it's really hard to learn anything from them.
  - paganel 14y ago
    > but do you think that perhaps there could be any other reason, just any at all, that people don't see it your way? Of course that I'm aware of that, I'm not that self-centered :) > Once you've started explaining away why people disagree you with that kind of rhetoric, it's really hard to learn anything from them. English is not my primary language, so I'm not 100% sure I understand what you're saying, but in case you're suggesting that I'm full of what will turn out to be empty rhetoric then of course that you have the right to your opinion. Anyway, I find it crazy that a guy like me (I think I'm in HN's bottom bracket when it comes to programming- or CS-ability) somehow sort of "defends" a guy like Alan Kay. I'm only doing it for the energy, the passion, the whatever-you-want-to-call-it that always gets to me when I'm reading Alan Kay's interviews. I agree it's something subjective.

noonespecial 14y ago

"A lot of people go into computing just because they are uncomfortable with other people. So it is no mean task to put together five different kinds of Asperger's syndrome and get them to cooperate. American business is completely fucked up because it is all about competition. Our world was built for the good from cooperation." So much insight, so few words.

guscost 14y ago
I think it seems so poignant because the general phenomenon has been corrupting our society for a long time. I can't imagine that this is the first time disruptive and powerful technologies have subverted the moral codes that their inventors were ostensibly upholding.
wyclif 14y ago
Kay may think that "American business is completely fucked up", but it's also undeniable that American business has been the greatest engine for technological progress the world has ever seen. Kay's anti-capitalism is showing, and it isn't particularly glorious to behold.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Agreed for some value of progress. Some worrying aspects. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57468103-37/apple-bows-out-of-program-for-environment-minded-products/ http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-57468103-37/apple-bows-out...
- kitsune_ 14y ago
  World War 1, 2 and the Cold War have been the greatest engines for technological progress the world has ever seen.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    Ah yeah ? How do you demonstrate that? Looks like the industrial revolution had nothing to do with wars at all... strange, somehow stuff got invented anyway. I'd be very careful about making such implications that "wars are good for technology". We have seen more advances in the past 20 years in technology than any time before, yet it was already the end of the Cold war. How do you explain that??

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

ryanhuff 14y ago

If the web had proper time to incubate without the pressures of the dotcom craze, I suspect it would have developed in a much more controlled, and systematic way. As we know, development was very chaotic and competitive. I do think we will get to a better place eventually. After all, the web is still a relatively new medium, especially when compared to the "Internet".

keithpeter 14y ago

"A side note: Re-creating Kay's answers to interview questions was particularly difficult. Rather than the linear explanation in response to an interview question, his answers were more of a cavalcade of topics, tangents, and tales threaded together, sometimes quite loosely — always rich, and frequently punctuated by strong opinions. The text that follows attempts to create somewhat more linearity to the content. — ALB" Audio would be ace.

staunch 14y ago

It seems like he's still stuck thinking about computers the way he was many years ago. Wikipedia isn't amazing because it doesn't have a WYSIWYG editor and can't run code on the (very few) pages where that's even applicable? He doesn't seem to get that what makes the web amazing is the data and people connected to it. That's generally far more interesting to users than novel interfaces or whiz-bang features. Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, etc aren't technically all that interesting or innovative. They're infinitely more transformative than nearly all software that came before them though.

vosper 14y ago
All of the companies you cite ARE technically innovative - Google created map-reduce (amongst many other things); Facebook stores, indexes and retrieve billions of images; Twitter contributed real-time graph processing (Storm) to the open-source world, and mostly solved fan-out on a massive scale; Wikipedia - well, it's Wikipedia, and it's done on a tight budget, to boot. Everyone's standing on the shoulders of giants, but the idea that the contributions of top engineers and scientists today are somehow less than those that came previously is ridiculous - Kay seems hurt that people have taken the ideas and run with them, and doesn't seem to get that not everyone's as smart as him - and that's fine, we can still have something to offer.
- gaius 14y ago
  Google created map-reduce Only if they also created a time machine, map and reduce are there in the Common Lisp spec from '84 and doubtless pre-date that by a decade or two. mostly solved fan-out on a massive scale Well, if you mean created a poor copy of what Teknekron (now known as Tibco) were doing in '86, and they were mainly commercializing research from the '70s.
  - Dn_Ab 14y ago
    It's worth noting that the Google "MapReduce" is not type equivalent to the map (roughly 'a list -> 'b list) and reduce ('a list -> 'b) found in Lisp and functional languages. It is actually in a way, an opposite. That is, the map (roughly 'a -> 'b list) in mapreduce is actually more like the dual/opposite of reduce (unfold). And reduce is well, a complicated beast. I think - the ideas behind MapReduce are not difficult but nor are they necessarily inevitable. The innovative part of MapReduce is Google getting to a place such that the constraints force that approach as obvious. MapReduce is impressive.

bcantrill 14y ago

Alan Kay is a brilliant guy, but I really wish he could open his mouth without shooting it off. In particular -- to speak to my own domain -- he bleats about "feature creep" in an operating system with absolutely no demonstrated understanding for a modern OS. Is KVM "feature creep"? Is ZFS? Is DTrace? He shows not so much as an ounce of understanding for why these things exist or empathy with those for whom they were created. I have great reverence for history (and Kay and I share an intense love for the B5000[1]), but I also think it's a mistake to romanticize the past. Viz., when he wistfully recalls the Unix kernel having "1,000 lines of code", he can only be talking about Sixth Edition: even by Seventh Edition (circa 1979!), the kernel had (conservatively) over ten times that amount.[2] And this is still a system that lacked a VM system and TCP/IP stack -- and tossed if you created the 151st process![3] If he wants to criticize the path that history has taken, fine -- but when he is so ignorant of the specifics of that path, it's very hard to treat him as anything but a crank, albeit an eminent one. [1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010407 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010407 [2] http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7 http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7 [3] newproc() in http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/sys/sys/slp.c http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/sys/sys/...

konstruktor 14y ago
I think inplicitly Kay is talking about personal computing, not servers, and that in isolation is a very narrow perspective. But following his thinking for a moment: does a 'PC' need VMs, ZFS and dtrace? Apple has shown that, by removing many things that seemed essential, like a user-visible file system, you can build a personal computer that appeals to a lot of people. I firmly believe this is not the right tradeoff to make, even for personal computing in general, but people are throwing loads of money at them...
- sev 14y ago
  Apple doesn't "remove a user visible file system", they just make direct file system manipulation not as much of a necessity. And yet, this is not why their OS is good: it's because, if you want to, you can manipulate the file system and view it in as much detail as a BSD (OpenBSD) server, with just as much ease, combined with great hardware-software compatibility.

chris_wot 14y ago

Is this how he really said it, or was the author paraphrasing?

jorangreef 14y ago

Browsers were built around the idea of web pages, not web apps. The security model works for web pages but precludes powerful web apps. There needs to be a way for a user to grant UDP, TCP or POSIX power to a web app, because WebSockets are not TCP, and IndexedDB is not POSIX and never can be. Just UDP, TCP and POSIX and we're done. Let the community build everything better and faster on top.

nl 14y ago

If they reinvented what Engelbart, did we'd be way ahead of where we are now. I give you http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/hyperscope.html http://www.dougengelbart.org/about/hyperscope.html, implemented in 2006 on that horrible web thing Kay complains about. So there is that...

chris_wot 14y ago

"You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized." Actually, no. Perhaps if you are Roman Catholic (and even then that's questionable); Evangelical Christians either believe that you don't do anything to get to heaven and Jesus saves you, or you choose to believe that Jesus Christ died as one perfect sacrifice for the forgiveness of those who follow Jesus. You may not agree, but I'm pointing out that the statement by Kay is pretty inaccruate.

jorangreef 14y ago
There are many interpretations of what it means to follow Christ. The rational interpretation is Christ's own interpretation, the historical gospel story, from the beginning of the Old Testament right through to the end of the New Testament. The Scriptures are historical, they provide the facts of the events. Thankfully they are also theological and interpret the meaning of the events. Did it happen? What does it mean?
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Agreed - however, I was merely pointing out that Alan Kay stated that Christians believe that "You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized", which is about as far as possible from the position of such a considerable number of Christians it's unfunny! So it's not that I disagree with any assertions that there are many interpretations of what it means to follow Christ, but that I disagree that the statement was accurate for all Christians. It is my opinion that a very small minority of Christians really believe that. I realise that I've been voted down for pointing this out, but I thought it was an important viewpoint to bring forth in the discussion, given that Alan Kay made it the basis for his "Socrates should go to heaven" argument. Alan Kay might be excellent as a Computer Scientist, but his digression into the Christian religion was remarkably uninformed.
- sp332 14y ago
  Fundamentalist radical literalist Christian here :) It's simple: when Jesus and two thieves were being crucified together, he told one of them that he would see him in paradise that day. Ergo, baptism is not a necessary requirement of getting to heaven. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%2023&version=HCSB https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke%2023&v... (I would start around verse 32)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

pjmlp 14y ago

I fully agree with him. The web was designed for reading documents not to try to shoehorn an operating system into the browser. Thankfully the mobile world is bringing back the desktop applications concept, while using the network for communication protocols as it is supposed to be.

dan-k 14y ago
That's the exact opposite position from what Kay said: "...what you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features.... You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a mini-operating system..." Essentially he's saying that the way we think of browsers is holding the web back. We could have collaborative WYSIWYG editing of Wikipedia or blogs, for example, but instead we're stuck with just reading documents. Perhaps it would be correct to say that the web was designed for reading documents, but it shouldn't have been (at least according to Kay).

gits1225 14y ago

Why is the title of the post renamed? Should the titles be boring and dry instead of being informative one line summary of the article that people may find interesting enough to read it? Look what happened to the previous submission of the same article here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224966 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4224966. Such a good article went unnoticed because the title was plain unattractive. Can we have a little bit of 'submitters freedom' here? P.S: Original title was: "Internet by Brilliant minds, Web by Amateurs, Browser a lament"

chris_wot 14y ago
I actually think it was a good rename. He said a lot more than that, and sensational titles aren't really needed on HN.
- gits1225 14y ago
  I do agree on 'cheap' sensational titles, but I don't think mine was. I think it was a better title more in-line to what Alan Kay emphasized in the article, giving it a bit of context to interest someone to read a great interview, instead of just a generic 'Click Here' like the previous submitter's, leading people to think it was not worth 'clicking through'.
  - chris_wot 14y ago
    Fair comment - on further reflection I agree, the title was reasonable as it highlighted the emphasis placed by Alan Kay. It wasn't the title that was sensational, it what Alan Kay said in the interview. Apologies for suggesting otherwise!
DennisP 14y ago
Although the new title is bland, it got me to read it. I likely would have skipped the the original unless "Alan Kay" was in there somewhere.
- gits1225 14y ago

haberman 14y ago

I haven't read too much Alan Kay before, but this interview made me realize that he's not really the inventor of object-orientation as we currently think of it. He says as much directly in the interview: "And that's true of most of the things that are called object-oriented systems today. None of them are object-oriented systems according to my definition. Objects were a radical idea, then they got retrograded." It sounds like his conception of "objects" is a more user-facing thing; an object is something you see on your screen and can interact with and manipulate by programming. This view blurs the line between users and programmers. I'm not sure this is a terribly realistic model for how normal people want to interact with computers. For all his disdain for the web, it has succeeded in bring content to over 2B people worldwide, most of whom wouldn't have the first idea what to do with a Smalltalk environment.

david927 14y ago
You need to read Alan Kay.
- haberman 14y ago
  Maybe so, but this interview didn't really inspire me to. Almost nothing he had to say made any sense whatsoever. Wikipedia has a failure of imagination because the Logo page doesn't let you write Logo programs? What's wrong with Wikipedia being an encyclopedia and linking to some web page that is a full-on Logo programming environment? I'm not really sure what I got wrong that explains the downvotes to -3.
  - eterps 14y ago
    You're mistaking this particular example with the general idea. What he means is that computers can do so much more than displaying text based content. And he not only wants you te be able to interact with information, he wants you to be able to create that kind of interactivity without becoming a real programmer first. To give a different example than the one about Logo; imagine a Wikipedia page about a well known mathematical principle, you can explain it with text and some images, but you could have explained it just as well on paper. Instead you could explain things in ways that only a computer enables you to do, for example like this: http://worrydream.com/#!/KillMath http://worrydream.com/#!/KillMath But that still scratches the surface compared to the stuff that Alan Kay wants to be the norm. I advice you read Alan Kay's work with that in mind: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

limist 14y ago

There's a compelling quote within the first page: But the thing that traumatized me occurred a couple years later, when I found an old copy of Life magazine that had the Margaret Bourke-White photos from Buchenwald. This was in the 1940s — no TV, living on a farm. That's when I realized that adults were dangerous. Like, really dangerous. I forgot about those pictures for a few years, but I had nightmares. But I had forgotten where the images came from. Seven or eight years later, I started getting memories back in snatches, and I went back and found the magazine. That probably was the turning point that changed my entire attitude toward life. It was responsible for getting me interested in education. My interest in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults. Here's a link to the photos (some unpublished) that he refers to: http://life.time.com/history/behind-the-picture-bourke-white-and-the-liberation-of-buchenwald/#1 http://life.time.com/history/behind-the-picture-bourke-white...