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The Deep Insights of Alan Kay

191 points by mythz 14y ago

david927 14y ago
Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science, showing us -loudly- the way forward, and he's largely ignored. I don't know of a more damning indictment than that.
- tensor 14y ago
  This is all too common in the IT community. Instead of learning what those before us learnt, we get hung up arguing over made up differences between industry and academia, or worry about the minutes it takes us to setup a new project in a given langage. We jump on what's popular for the sake of being "cool as well." We get hung up on minor syntax differences in languages. Or worse, in some cases we ignore real benefits of syntax simply because we are too lazy to take the week it takes to retrain ourselves to learn it. We fight about editors! Editors! If all of that wasn't bad enough, the more ignorant we are the more we seem to aggressively champion a given technology and attack others without the backing of any serious thought. We become so attached to our favorite tools that they become beyond criticism of any form.
  - konstruktor 14y ago
    To quote Alan Kay, we are too busy trying to reinvent the flat tire.
  - aaronblohowiak 14y ago
    > Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
- chc 14y ago
  I agree that Alan Kay is brilliant, but to be completely fair, if Squeak is the way forward, I think I'm happy where I am. It's not bad, but the tradeoffs are such that it's hard to imagine ever using it for production software.
  - mythz 14y ago
    Note: Squeak/Smalltalk were revolutionary at the time and influenced many of the modern languages we use today. The way forward isn't to use Squeak/Smalltalk (which Alan also wanted to kill off), it's to be inspired by their ideas, embrace the good, rework the bad and to build something better.
    - krichman 14y ago
      Yes. Smalltalk was a work of genius. It seems like every good idea in modern languages I learn about turns out to have been poached from either Smalltalk or Lisp.
  - grinich 14y ago
    Every use Objective-C? It's pretty much Smalltalk with C backwards compatibility.
    - chc 14y ago
      I've been using Objective-C for about 12 years now. It is similar to Smalltalk in its message system and naming conventions — which, to be fair, were at the core of Kay's Smalltalk vision — but otherwise the experience of programming in Objective-C is not much like programming in Squeak.
      - nzeribe 14y ago
        That is no bad thing, because programming in Squeak absolutely blows programming in Xcode away.
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      It's Smalltalk but without the image, without browsers, without inspectors, without live objects, without... Well... you get it...
psadri 14y ago
... orientated around “visions rather than goals” and “funded people, not projects” being exclusively goal oriented constrains the originality of the high level ideas that are produced. on the other hand, being constrained by specific goals (eg: put a person on the moon) can produce a lot of creativity as people's efforts are focused on a narrow domain of problems to solve.
podperson 14y ago
I admire Alan Kay as much as the next guy and a lot of this stuff in this article looks great, but he doesn't need his lily gilded: * Laser Printers Yes -- invented at Xerox PARC. * Object Orientated Programming / Smalltalk No. OOP was invented in Norway (Simula) / Yes * Personal Computers Um... really? No. * Ethernet / Distributed Computing Yes Xerox PARC. / Not really * GUI / Mouse / WYSIWYG No (Englebart et al) / No (Englebart et al) / Yes See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i...
- mythz 14y ago
  See: http://www.parc.com/about/ http://www.parc.com/about/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company) There is no question that Alan did invent the term "Object Oriented Programming" (and was rewarded with a Turing award for his work) and also invented Smalltalk which was well known to be inspired by Lisp, Simula, Logo, Sketchpad. The GUI, overlapping windows on a bitmap screen, WYSIWIG editor, etc i.e. the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC that later influenced and was commercialized by Apple.
  - podperson 14y ago
    Naming something isn't inventing it. Kay's Turing award was "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages" which might or might not include inventing "Object Oriented Programming..." and as it happens turns out not to. See: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm Key quote from the article: "While working on FLEX, Kay witnessed Douglas Engelbart’s demonstration of interactive computing designed to support collaborative work groups. Engelbart’s vision influenced Kay to adopt graphical interfaces, hypertext, and the mouse." Incidentally, Doug Engelbart is still alive and a Turing award winner: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/engelbart_7929781.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/engelbart_7929781.cfm "Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976 due to various misfortunes and misunderstandings. Several of Engelbart's best researchers had become alienated from him and left his organization when Xerox PARC was created in 1970." History of OOP including Simula 67: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming Go look at the "Mother of All Demos" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos -- which introduces the mouse, a macdraw-like drawing program, and a mouse-driven word processor. This is the invention of the GUI that not only predates Xerox PARC but students from the lab that did this work went on to work at Xerox PARC. (And the Xerox PARC mouse was a clumsy, expensive, and unreliable device very similar to the crude device from the older demo -- the modern mouse was actually invented by an engineer contracted by Steve Jobs). "the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC" The personal computer as we know it today was invented by a lot of people over a period of time, although it is usually ascribed to Apple, Altair, IMSAI, etc. -- not Xerox. Xerox added a GUI to their $10,000 "personal computer" and that is a feature of today's personal computer, but so are scalable fonts (btw: that's Donald Knuth who deserves as much fanboi love as Alan Kay) and web browsers, neither of which were created by Xerox.
gnosis 14y ago
There's really no way to adequately summarize such a varied and content-rich article. You should really read it in full for yourself. But here are the section headings: * On Software Engineering * On Object Orientated Programming * Tear it down and build something better * On Messaging * On LISP * The Unknown side of Alan Kay
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Uhhrrr 14y ago
"Object Orientated"? Really? How does someone read so much material on Alan Kay and still manage to have "object orientated" stuck in their head? It's like putting together an overview of Edward Said's "Orientatilism".
- cgh 14y ago
  I feel the same way about "orientated". But my British friends tell me that's the normal usage of the word in the UK and "oriented" sounds as strange to them as "orientated" does to me. That said, Kay did call it object-oriented programming, so it makes sense to stick with his name.
  - rjknight 14y ago
    I'm British and I think your British friends are wrong. I do agree that most of the people who use "orientated" are British but I don't understand where they get that from. "Orientation" is the term for the process of orienting something. So a design process in which, say, user stories are turned into object-oriented designs could be called "object-orientation". But it does not follow that the result is "object-orientated" - we'd just call it "object-oriented", in the same way that something which has been through a transformation is not "transformated" but "transformed".
- mythz 14y ago
  Updated, apologies for the misspelling.
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army 14y ago
Some of those points are a bit misleading. Sure, you can define a lisp interpreter in very few lines of code. But to build a decent standard library and optimizing compiler/JIT, that is where the LOCs rack up.
- wmf 14y ago
  IIRC STEPS includes compilers and optimizers that are written in fairly few lines of code using stacks of DSLs.
  - kragen 14y ago
    It remains to be seen whether they succeed in producing a decent optimizing compiler and a decent standard library.
    - mythz 14y ago
      The OMeta project is available to play with now: http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/ http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/ Which also has a JS port http://tinlizzie.org/ometa-js/ http://tinlizzie.org/ometa-js/ so you can create new languages/DSLs and run them in your browser.
    - corysama 14y ago
      As far as optimizing compiler... Maru might not yet qualify as decent, but it's a good start. http://piumarta.com/software/maru/ http://piumarta.com/software/maru/ "The whole thing is 1750 lines of code (about twice what it should be) and includes a garbage collector and user-level implementations of user-defined types and structures, single-dispatch object-oriented "messaging", and generic "multimethods" (all of which are needed by the compiler). The compiled binary code runs at about 30% the speed of aggressively-optimised C."
      - kragen 14y ago
        Maru (a Lisp) looks awesome! However, unoptimized C runs at about 25% the speed of aggressively-optimized C. The current version of Maru seems to be about 9000 lines of code (almost half the entire complexity budget for STEPS!) I think this reinforces army's original point, "Sure, you can define a lisp interpreter in very few lines of code. But to build a decent standard library and optimizing compiler/JIT, that is where the LOCs rack up."
thebear 14y ago
Thanks for this post; the importance of Alan Kay's work can hardly be overstated. Here's another quote by him that I find interesting: I invented the term Object-Oriented and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. Whether or not you share the disdain for C++ that is implicit in this quote, I believe it is important to understand the difference between the way OO was originally conceived of and the way C++ interprets it. I believe the best way to understand the difference is to look at object-variable binding. Smalltalk and almost every other OO language that followed it uses reference semantics: the assignment x = y causes the variable x to release its binding to whatever object it is currently referring to, and to refer to the object that y is referring to instead. C++, on the other hand, is pretty much the only OO language that uses value semantics: the intended meaning of the assignment x = y is to copy the state of the object to which y is referring over to the object to which x is referring. The older and wiser I get the more I am inclined to believe that this attempt to marry OO and value semantics was an experiment that has failed. Even if you do not believe this, you'd have to admit that the collective amount of time and effort that the C++ community has spent on dealing with the assignment operator is simply staggering. (I would have made that last statement even two years ago, and now we have rvalue refereces.)
- alephnil 14y ago
  The object model of C++ is almost entirely from Simula rather than from smalltalk. The object model of Simula is less dynamic and the language itself is based on Algol rather than being built from scratch like Smalltalk. In many ways, Simulas rather than Smalltalks object model has been the most influential, through C++ and later Java and C#.
  - skrebbel 14y ago
    Can't be. Simula wasn't invented by Alan Kay.
- abc_lisper 14y ago
  Yeah, but Java has primitives and thus value semantics you mention. Also, Java is much cleaner than c++ and on the scale of object-ness, java ranks higher than c++ but only a little bit.
vidoc 14y ago
While there's no question that some of Alan Kay's achievements are very important, I cannot help but thinking that our industry's tendency to surrender to 'fanism' (e.g: douglas crockford, linus torvalds) - is ridiculous.
- RivieraKid 14y ago
  Exactly. There are loads of people with much more interesting ideas, for example the author of this article: http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/why-not-events/ http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/why-not-events/.
- IheartApplesDix 14y ago
  You have to admit, Fascism is a great system for getting things done. Oh my bad, you said fanism.
- mythz 14y ago
  Learning the educated insights from the brilliant minds in history is not 'fanism', it's benefiting and building off their experiences and is what Alan refers to when he says: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points" In his talk he uses Leonardo Da Vinci who despite being one of the smartest people in existence wasn't able to invent a motor for any of his machines, a feat accomplished by a less capable Mr Ford who did it en-masse. Not learning from history is one of the reasons why the state of the industry is where it's at today.
  - vidoc 14y ago
    Don't get me wrong, I'm not contradicting that, nor am I advocating not learning from history. I just think that stuff like that: "The Deep Insights of Alan Kay" "Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science"" is over the top.
    - mythz 14y ago
      I never said "Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science" (though he's obviously a contender) And I have no regrets over the title "The Deep Insights of Alan Kay"... Alan has generated a wealth of intellect, experience and insights in his works that most IT people still don't know about or even know who he is. The objective of the post is to bring some of his meaningful and powerful ideas to the surface and summarize them so it's more palatable and more accessible to more people - I think the title accurately captures this.
pbreit 14y ago
I don't think the dig on the "web amateurs" is fair. It seems clear to me that the simple and, perhaps, amateurish underpinnings of the web (http & HTML) ended up being a great strength.
- moe 14y ago
  I disagree. HTTP is defensible, HTML also has its time and place. But what it evolved into (HTML/CSS/JS) is pretty obviously a dead-end waiting to happen. The number of hacks we pile on one another for a "modern web-application" is nothing short of ridiculous. Realistically we still live in the internet stone-age, helplessly piling up stones and wooden sticks...
lani 14y ago
has anyone seen him talking about a Tim Gallwey video ? Kathy Sierra mentioned one of Alan Kay's talks called 'doing with images makes symbols'... I'm trying to find this one ..
grinich 14y ago
I've admired Alan Kay's work for years, but I wish he had another Jobs/Apple to turn his ideas into products. His work on the GUI was put into the Mac, Smalltalk directly influenced Objective-C, and the Dynabook is clearly a predecessor to the iPad. I don't think VPRI is a similar vehicle for new work. It's a really tough dichotomy: people who invent world-changing things very rarely have the skills (or desire) to spend years polishing and shipping. I think almost all of academia is great example of this, where invention is praised over innovation. I'm not saying this is bad. Researchers excel at doing research, and should focus in that domain. But papers and conference talks don't change the world. It takes real products, which are the result of substantial non-idea work. Even Doug Engelbart's famous demo took decades to actually build at scale. One of the most important things about PARC may have been that it was a pairing of research-like projects with real world engineering accomplishments. For several years, I've felt like Google is on the verge of this as well. Glass may be their first shipping experimental product, so we'll see. It'd be interesting if Alan took a research position at Google. Hal Abelson (inventor of Scheme, founder of Creative Commons, prof at MIT, etc.) spent a sabbatical there and shipped App Inventor for Android, which essentially took ideas from the Scratch programming environment and made them work for Android. Something like Smalltalk on top of App Engine could be really awesome. When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world. -- Alan Kay
- BoredAstronaut 14y ago
  Not many people know this, but the iPhone was a stop-gap on the way to developing the iPad. I know a chap who was on the iPad R&D team, as an intern, before the iPhone came out.
  - podperson 14y ago
    It's funny how various folk cite Alan Kay's Dynabook "vision" but plenty of people had this "vision" (witness the "prior art" for the iPad in 2001 or Hari Seldon's electronic notepad in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"). Steve Jobs was designing notebooks and tablets on a sketchpad when the Mac was being developed. Bill Atkinson had a similar "vision" which led to his developing HyperCard (because it could be done at the time).
qznc 14y ago
Oh, how I would like to base everything on simple abstractions like “real computers all the way down (RCATWD)”. However, reality seems to think differently. James Hague recently said it well: "Simplicity is Wonderful, But Not a Requirement" http://prog21.dadgum.com/167.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/167.html
qznc 14y ago
If "message passing between objects" is so great, then why do those distributed object frameworks (CORBA,(D)COM) not rule the world? Bad execution?
- andolanra 14y ago
  Those aren't exactly what Kay has in mind. And as a matter of fact, message passing between objects does rule the world in the form of the internet. In CORBA and other RPC mechanisms, both sides have some kind of description of the protocol from which they generate methods. If the interface changes, then the code must be regenerated on both sides. On the other hand, Kay believes in individual nodes having full freedom to handle any kind of message and decide what they do with it, not necessarily strictly conforming to a decided-on protocol. It's analogous to the idea of objects adopted by C++ and SmallTalk. With C++, method calls are essentially procedure calls with a specific signature that are dispatched based on a special parameter (i.e. this). It makes no sense to invoke a method that doesn't exist. In SmallTalk, you can send any message you'd like to an object, and the object can choose to deal with it in any way it wants, up to and including catch-all code for dealing with any kind of message. CORBA and its ilk work with a protocol, and messages not conforming to the protocol are nonsensical. Computers on the internet can send any message to any computer, and each can deal with the messages in any way it wants. The internet is a network of message-passing objects.
- charlieflowers 14y ago
  Those are pretty much RPC (remote procedure call), which Kay names as the opposite of message passing. My take on what Kay is saying is that he is in favor of something much more like "service oriented architecture" -- but certainly without all the buttloads of cruft that have come to be associated with that phrase.
- mythz 14y ago
  CORBA/DCOM/SOAP-RPC are examples of RPC-based services, i.e. exactly what Alan is advocating against. Here's my definition of a message-based service: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/What-is-a-message-based-web-service%3F https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/What-is-a-... Here are some of the advantages: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages-of-message-based-web-services https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages... Here is the difference between WCF RPC methods and a message-based ServiceStack service: http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-35.png http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-35.png (i.e. 6 RPC methods vs 1 Msg service) Here is the difference between WebApi RPC methods vs an equivalent message-based ServiceStack service: http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-34.png http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-34.png (e.g. 5 RPC vs 2 msg ones)
codemac 14y ago
> The ARPA/PARC history shows that a combination of vision, a modest amount of funding, with a felicitous context and process can almost magically give rise to new technologies that not only amplify civilization, but also produce tremendous wealth for the society. [...] felicitous context and process [...] I am interested in what the process is he's referring to that PARC used. I think software engineering as a discipline is too young to have decent processes figured out, as is evident with the takeover of the "agile/scrum" process (I don't mean this in a bad way, but before this it was either NO process or a bug tracker with dates in it).
- vajrabum 14y ago
  He's thinking process at a higher level than you are. He means process in terms of funding, choice of vision and who chooses to commit people and resources. It's his contention that ARPA in the early to mid 60s had a funding/research process that really worked. The nut of it was to pick productive people with vision and get out of their way and let them drive.
espeed 14y ago
To me, one of the nice things about the semantics of real objects is that they are “real computers all the way down (RCATWD)” – this always retains the full ability to represent anything. I remember 15 years ago when Philip Greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com http://philip.greenspun.com) first introduced me to the idea that a Web service is like an object -- it may seem obvious today, but at the time it completely changed my Web view: The challenge is in realizing that the Web service itself is an object. The object has state, typically stored in a relational database management system. The object has methods (the URLs) and arguments to those methods (the inputs of the forms that target the URLs). The engineering challenges of Web development are (a) coming up with the correct data model for the object state, (b) coming up with a correct and maintainable organization of URLs, and (c) defining the semantics of each URL. By the time an individual page is constructed, the engineering challenge is over and it doesn't really matter whether you build that script in a simple language (e.g., Perl or Tcl) or a complex powerful language (e.g., Common Lisp or Java). http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.html http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.htm... Philip also discusses this idea in chapter 13 of his classic book, "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" (http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/). But as Alan Kay points out, this RPC-type model still hasn't evolved to a point where you can pass around self-contained objects that are RCATWD.
malbs 14y ago
Anything I've ever read that Alan Kay has written, either inspires me greatly, or depresses me deeply. His POV is worth 80 IQ quote is something I live by. It applies to _every_ aspect of life. Then you listen to him talk about computer science, computing in general, and what the future might hold, and you end up wondering why we're using languages today that are essentially prettied up versions of languages 40 and 50 years old (sweeping generalisation!)
- malbs 14y ago
  reading that back, damn, the "depresses me deeply" is a terrible exaggeration, making light of anyone who actually suffers from genuine depression.
  - talaketu 14y ago
    come now... not all depression is clinical.
- olliesaunders 14y ago
  I don’t really understand what he means by the POV quote. Could you explain it?
mike_ivanov 14y ago
The author lost me here: "Which didn’t even require inheritance, which is not like we know it today".
endlessvoid94 14y ago
What network protocol did the ARPA network at PARC use?
martinced 14y ago
My new favorite from Alan Kay, which I just learned from TFA: "Lisp: greatest single programming language ever designed" My previous favorite quote attributed to Alan Kay, which is not in TFA: "I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." : )
warmfuzzykitten 14y ago
It's a small thing, I know, but the author's use of "orientated" for "oriented" was a bit annoying. Other than that, it's a nice collection of quotes and links. Good to see.
elviejo 14y ago
Alan Kay is a voice that we need to listen more... we are distracted from the fact that our current Industry generates a lot of money... too look at the fact that our Craft is in the pyramid construction age.... we need real architecture and real engineering.
drpepper 14y ago
I'd love to get a hold of that Bob Barton article Alan Kay talks about, but strangely it seems like all the PDFs of it have been taken down...
- mythz 14y ago
  The revolutionary 1961 Bob Barton paper Alan Kay was referring to was called "A new approach to the functional design of a digital computer". Here's a copy of it on Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000 http://www.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000
  - drpepper 14y ago
    Great!
ternaryoperator 14y ago
Surprised not to see any quotes from Dr. Dobb's interview with Kay from 2012 ( http://www.drdobbs.com/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/240003442 ) Some quotes from that interview: "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." "Extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve." "I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward. If they reinvented what Engelbart did we'd be way ahead of where we are now." and so on...
ned11 14y ago
Good article. I Just translated it into Chinese and posted that in my blog(http://ned11.iteye.com/blog/1828088 http://ned11.iteye.com/blog/1828088). Thanks for the introduction to such a great people.

191 points by mythz 14y ago

Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science, showing us -loudly- the way forward, and he's largely ignored. I don't know of a more damning indictment than that.

tensor 14y ago
This is all too common in the IT community. Instead of learning what those before us learnt, we get hung up arguing over made up differences between industry and academia, or worry about the minutes it takes us to setup a new project in a given langage. We jump on what's popular for the sake of being "cool as well." We get hung up on minor syntax differences in languages. Or worse, in some cases we ignore real benefits of syntax simply because we are too lazy to take the week it takes to retrain ourselves to learn it. We fight about editors! Editors! If all of that wasn't bad enough, the more ignorant we are the more we seem to aggressively champion a given technology and attack others without the backing of any serious thought. We become so attached to our favorite tools that they become beyond criticism of any form.
- konstruktor 14y ago
  To quote Alan Kay, we are too busy trying to reinvent the flat tire.
- aaronblohowiak 14y ago
  > Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] — and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.
chc 14y ago
I agree that Alan Kay is brilliant, but to be completely fair, if Squeak is the way forward, I think I'm happy where I am. It's not bad, but the tradeoffs are such that it's hard to imagine ever using it for production software.
- mythz 14y ago
  Note: Squeak/Smalltalk were revolutionary at the time and influenced many of the modern languages we use today. The way forward isn't to use Squeak/Smalltalk (which Alan also wanted to kill off), it's to be inspired by their ideas, embrace the good, rework the bad and to build something better.
  - krichman 14y ago
    Yes. Smalltalk was a work of genius. It seems like every good idea in modern languages I learn about turns out to have been poached from either Smalltalk or Lisp.
- grinich 14y ago
  Every use Objective-C? It's pretty much Smalltalk with C backwards compatibility.
  - chc 14y ago
    I've been using Objective-C for about 12 years now. It is similar to Smalltalk in its message system and naming conventions — which, to be fair, were at the core of Kay's Smalltalk vision — but otherwise the experience of programming in Objective-C is not much like programming in Squeak.
    - nzeribe 14y ago
      That is no bad thing, because programming in Squeak absolutely blows programming in Xcode away.
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    It's Smalltalk but without the image, without browsers, without inspectors, without live objects, without... Well... you get it...

psadri 14y ago

... orientated around “visions rather than goals” and “funded people, not projects” being exclusively goal oriented constrains the originality of the high level ideas that are produced. on the other hand, being constrained by specific goals (eg: put a person on the moon) can produce a lot of creativity as people's efforts are focused on a narrow domain of problems to solve.

podperson 14y ago

I admire Alan Kay as much as the next guy and a lot of this stuff in this article looks great, but he doesn't need his lily gilded: * Laser Printers Yes -- invented at Xerox PARC. * Object Orientated Programming / Smalltalk No. OOP was invented in Norway (Simula) / Yes * Personal Computers Um... really? No. * Ethernet / Distributed Computing Yes Xerox PARC. / Not really * GUI / Mouse / WYSIWYG No (Englebart et al) / No (Englebart et al) / Yes See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_interface http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_graphical_user_i...

mythz 14y ago
See: http://www.parc.com/about/ http://www.parc.com/about/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company) There is no question that Alan did invent the term "Object Oriented Programming" (and was rewarded with a Turing award for his work) and also invented Smalltalk which was well known to be inspired by Lisp, Simula, Logo, Sketchpad. The GUI, overlapping windows on a bitmap screen, WYSIWIG editor, etc i.e. the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC that later influenced and was commercialized by Apple.
- podperson 14y ago
  Naming something isn't inventing it. Kay's Turing award was "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages" which might or might not include inventing "Object Oriented Programming..." and as it happens turns out not to. See: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/kay_3972189.cfm Key quote from the article: "While working on FLEX, Kay witnessed Douglas Engelbart’s demonstration of interactive computing designed to support collaborative work groups. Engelbart’s vision influenced Kay to adopt graphical interfaces, hypertext, and the mouse." Incidentally, Doug Engelbart is still alive and a Turing award winner: http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/engelbart_7929781.cfm http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/engelbart_7929781.cfm "Engelbart slipped into relative obscurity after 1976 due to various misfortunes and misunderstandings. Several of Engelbart's best researchers had become alienated from him and left his organization when Xerox PARC was created in 1970." History of OOP including Simula 67: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming Go look at the "Mother of All Demos" -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos -- which introduces the mouse, a macdraw-like drawing program, and a mouse-driven word processor. This is the invention of the GUI that not only predates Xerox PARC but students from the lab that did this work went on to work at Xerox PARC. (And the Xerox PARC mouse was a clumsy, expensive, and unreliable device very similar to the crude device from the older demo -- the modern mouse was actually invented by an engineer contracted by Steve Jobs). "the personal computer as we know it today was first created at PARC" The personal computer as we know it today was invented by a lot of people over a period of time, although it is usually ascribed to Apple, Altair, IMSAI, etc. -- not Xerox. Xerox added a GUI to their $10,000 "personal computer" and that is a feature of today's personal computer, but so are scalable fonts (btw: that's Donald Knuth who deserves as much fanboi love as Alan Kay) and web browsers, neither of which were created by Xerox.

gnosis 14y ago

There's really no way to adequately summarize such a varied and content-rich article. You should really read it in full for yourself. But here are the section headings: * On Software Engineering * On Object Orientated Programming * Tear it down and build something better * On Messaging * On LISP * The Unknown side of Alan Kay

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Uhhrrr 14y ago

"Object Orientated"? Really? How does someone read so much material on Alan Kay and still manage to have "object orientated" stuck in their head? It's like putting together an overview of Edward Said's "Orientatilism".

cgh 14y ago
I feel the same way about "orientated". But my British friends tell me that's the normal usage of the word in the UK and "oriented" sounds as strange to them as "orientated" does to me. That said, Kay did call it object-oriented programming, so it makes sense to stick with his name.
- rjknight 14y ago
  I'm British and I think your British friends are wrong. I do agree that most of the people who use "orientated" are British but I don't understand where they get that from. "Orientation" is the term for the process of orienting something. So a design process in which, say, user stories are turned into object-oriented designs could be called "object-orientation". But it does not follow that the result is "object-orientated" - we'd just call it "object-oriented", in the same way that something which has been through a transformation is not "transformated" but "transformed".
mythz 14y ago
Updated, apologies for the misspelling.

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army 14y ago

Some of those points are a bit misleading. Sure, you can define a lisp interpreter in very few lines of code. But to build a decent standard library and optimizing compiler/JIT, that is where the LOCs rack up.

wmf 14y ago
IIRC STEPS includes compilers and optimizers that are written in fairly few lines of code using stacks of DSLs.
- kragen 14y ago
  It remains to be seen whether they succeed in producing a decent optimizing compiler and a decent standard library.
  - mythz 14y ago
    The OMeta project is available to play with now: http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/ http://tinlizzie.org/ometa/ Which also has a JS port http://tinlizzie.org/ometa-js/ http://tinlizzie.org/ometa-js/ so you can create new languages/DSLs and run them in your browser.
  - corysama 14y ago
    As far as optimizing compiler... Maru might not yet qualify as decent, but it's a good start. http://piumarta.com/software/maru/ http://piumarta.com/software/maru/ "The whole thing is 1750 lines of code (about twice what it should be) and includes a garbage collector and user-level implementations of user-defined types and structures, single-dispatch object-oriented "messaging", and generic "multimethods" (all of which are needed by the compiler). The compiled binary code runs at about 30% the speed of aggressively-optimised C."
    - kragen 14y ago
      Maru (a Lisp) looks awesome! However, unoptimized C runs at about 25% the speed of aggressively-optimized C. The current version of Maru seems to be about 9000 lines of code (almost half the entire complexity budget for STEPS!) I think this reinforces army's original point, "Sure, you can define a lisp interpreter in very few lines of code. But to build a decent standard library and optimizing compiler/JIT, that is where the LOCs rack up."

thebear 14y ago

Thanks for this post; the importance of Alan Kay's work can hardly be overstated. Here's another quote by him that I find interesting: I invented the term Object-Oriented and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind. Whether or not you share the disdain for C++ that is implicit in this quote, I believe it is important to understand the difference between the way OO was originally conceived of and the way C++ interprets it. I believe the best way to understand the difference is to look at object-variable binding. Smalltalk and almost every other OO language that followed it uses reference semantics: the assignment x = y causes the variable x to release its binding to whatever object it is currently referring to, and to refer to the object that y is referring to instead. C++, on the other hand, is pretty much the only OO language that uses value semantics: the intended meaning of the assignment x = y is to copy the state of the object to which y is referring over to the object to which x is referring. The older and wiser I get the more I am inclined to believe that this attempt to marry OO and value semantics was an experiment that has failed. Even if you do not believe this, you'd have to admit that the collective amount of time and effort that the C++ community has spent on dealing with the assignment operator is simply staggering. (I would have made that last statement even two years ago, and now we have rvalue refereces.)

alephnil 14y ago
The object model of C++ is almost entirely from Simula rather than from smalltalk. The object model of Simula is less dynamic and the language itself is based on Algol rather than being built from scratch like Smalltalk. In many ways, Simulas rather than Smalltalks object model has been the most influential, through C++ and later Java and C#.
- skrebbel 14y ago
  Can't be. Simula wasn't invented by Alan Kay.
abc_lisper 14y ago
Yeah, but Java has primitives and thus value semantics you mention. Also, Java is much cleaner than c++ and on the scale of object-ness, java ranks higher than c++ but only a little bit.

vidoc 14y ago

While there's no question that some of Alan Kay's achievements are very important, I cannot help but thinking that our industry's tendency to surrender to 'fanism' (e.g: douglas crockford, linus torvalds) - is ridiculous.

RivieraKid 14y ago
Exactly. There are loads of people with much more interesting ideas, for example the author of this article: http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/why-not-events/ http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/07/01/why-not-events/.
IheartApplesDix 14y ago
You have to admit, Fascism is a great system for getting things done. Oh my bad, you said fanism.
mythz 14y ago
Learning the educated insights from the brilliant minds in history is not 'fanism', it's benefiting and building off their experiences and is what Alan refers to when he says: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points" In his talk he uses Leonardo Da Vinci who despite being one of the smartest people in existence wasn't able to invent a motor for any of his machines, a feat accomplished by a less capable Mr Ford who did it en-masse. Not learning from history is one of the reasons why the state of the industry is where it's at today.
- vidoc 14y ago
  Don't get me wrong, I'm not contradicting that, nor am I advocating not learning from history. I just think that stuff like that: "The Deep Insights of Alan Kay" "Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science"" is over the top.
  - mythz 14y ago
    I never said "Alan is the most important person alive in Computer Science" (though he's obviously a contender) And I have no regrets over the title "The Deep Insights of Alan Kay"... Alan has generated a wealth of intellect, experience and insights in his works that most IT people still don't know about or even know who he is. The objective of the post is to bring some of his meaningful and powerful ideas to the surface and summarize them so it's more palatable and more accessible to more people - I think the title accurately captures this.

pbreit 14y ago

I don't think the dig on the "web amateurs" is fair. It seems clear to me that the simple and, perhaps, amateurish underpinnings of the web (http & HTML) ended up being a great strength.

moe 14y ago
I disagree. HTTP is defensible, HTML also has its time and place. But what it evolved into (HTML/CSS/JS) is pretty obviously a dead-end waiting to happen. The number of hacks we pile on one another for a "modern web-application" is nothing short of ridiculous. Realistically we still live in the internet stone-age, helplessly piling up stones and wooden sticks...

lani 14y ago

has anyone seen him talking about a Tim Gallwey video ? Kathy Sierra mentioned one of Alan Kay's talks called 'doing with images makes symbols'... I'm trying to find this one ..

grinich 14y ago

I've admired Alan Kay's work for years, but I wish he had another Jobs/Apple to turn his ideas into products. His work on the GUI was put into the Mac, Smalltalk directly influenced Objective-C, and the Dynabook is clearly a predecessor to the iPad. I don't think VPRI is a similar vehicle for new work. It's a really tough dichotomy: people who invent world-changing things very rarely have the skills (or desire) to spend years polishing and shipping. I think almost all of academia is great example of this, where invention is praised over innovation. I'm not saying this is bad. Researchers excel at doing research, and should focus in that domain. But papers and conference talks don't change the world. It takes real products, which are the result of substantial non-idea work. Even Doug Engelbart's famous demo took decades to actually build at scale. One of the most important things about PARC may have been that it was a pairing of research-like projects with real world engineering accomplishments. For several years, I've felt like Google is on the verge of this as well. Glass may be their first shipping experimental product, so we'll see. It'd be interesting if Alan took a research position at Google. Hal Abelson (inventor of Scheme, founder of Creative Commons, prof at MIT, etc.) spent a sabbatical there and shipped App Inventor for Android, which essentially took ideas from the Scratch programming environment and made them work for Android. Something like Smalltalk on top of App Engine could be really awesome. When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world. -- Alan Kay

BoredAstronaut 14y ago
Not many people know this, but the iPhone was a stop-gap on the way to developing the iPad. I know a chap who was on the iPad R&D team, as an intern, before the iPhone came out.
- podperson 14y ago
  It's funny how various folk cite Alan Kay's Dynabook "vision" but plenty of people had this "vision" (witness the "prior art" for the iPad in 2001 or Hari Seldon's electronic notepad in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"). Steve Jobs was designing notebooks and tablets on a sketchpad when the Mac was being developed. Bill Atkinson had a similar "vision" which led to his developing HyperCard (because it could be done at the time).

qznc 14y ago

Oh, how I would like to base everything on simple abstractions like “real computers all the way down (RCATWD)”. However, reality seems to think differently. James Hague recently said it well: "Simplicity is Wonderful, But Not a Requirement" http://prog21.dadgum.com/167.html http://prog21.dadgum.com/167.html

qznc 14y ago

If "message passing between objects" is so great, then why do those distributed object frameworks (CORBA,(D)COM) not rule the world? Bad execution?

andolanra 14y ago
Those aren't exactly what Kay has in mind. And as a matter of fact, message passing between objects does rule the world in the form of the internet. In CORBA and other RPC mechanisms, both sides have some kind of description of the protocol from which they generate methods. If the interface changes, then the code must be regenerated on both sides. On the other hand, Kay believes in individual nodes having full freedom to handle any kind of message and decide what they do with it, not necessarily strictly conforming to a decided-on protocol. It's analogous to the idea of objects adopted by C++ and SmallTalk. With C++, method calls are essentially procedure calls with a specific signature that are dispatched based on a special parameter (i.e. this). It makes no sense to invoke a method that doesn't exist. In SmallTalk, you can send any message you'd like to an object, and the object can choose to deal with it in any way it wants, up to and including catch-all code for dealing with any kind of message. CORBA and its ilk work with a protocol, and messages not conforming to the protocol are nonsensical. Computers on the internet can send any message to any computer, and each can deal with the messages in any way it wants. The internet is a network of message-passing objects.
charlieflowers 14y ago
Those are pretty much RPC (remote procedure call), which Kay names as the opposite of message passing. My take on what Kay is saying is that he is in favor of something much more like "service oriented architecture" -- but certainly without all the buttloads of cruft that have come to be associated with that phrase.
mythz 14y ago
CORBA/DCOM/SOAP-RPC are examples of RPC-based services, i.e. exactly what Alan is advocating against. Here's my definition of a message-based service: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/What-is-a-message-based-web-service%3F https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/What-is-a-... Here are some of the advantages: https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages-of-message-based-web-services https://github.com/ServiceStack/ServiceStack/wiki/Advantages... Here is the difference between WCF RPC methods and a message-based ServiceStack service: http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-35.png http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-35.png (i.e. 6 RPC methods vs 1 Msg service) Here is the difference between WebApi RPC methods vs an equivalent message-based ServiceStack service: http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-34.png http://www.servicestack.net/files/slide-34.png (e.g. 5 RPC vs 2 msg ones)

codemac 14y ago

> The ARPA/PARC history shows that a combination of vision, a modest amount of funding, with a felicitous context and process can almost magically give rise to new technologies that not only amplify civilization, but also produce tremendous wealth for the society. [...] felicitous context and process [...] I am interested in what the process is he's referring to that PARC used. I think software engineering as a discipline is too young to have decent processes figured out, as is evident with the takeover of the "agile/scrum" process (I don't mean this in a bad way, but before this it was either NO process or a bug tracker with dates in it).

vajrabum 14y ago
He's thinking process at a higher level than you are. He means process in terms of funding, choice of vision and who chooses to commit people and resources. It's his contention that ARPA in the early to mid 60s had a funding/research process that really worked. The nut of it was to pick productive people with vision and get out of their way and let them drive.

espeed 14y ago

To me, one of the nice things about the semantics of real objects is that they are “real computers all the way down (RCATWD)” – this always retains the full ability to represent anything. I remember 15 years ago when Philip Greenspun (http://philip.greenspun.com http://philip.greenspun.com) first introduced me to the idea that a Web service is like an object -- it may seem obvious today, but at the time it completely changed my Web view: The challenge is in realizing that the Web service itself is an object. The object has state, typically stored in a relational database management system. The object has methods (the URLs) and arguments to those methods (the inputs of the forms that target the URLs). The engineering challenges of Web development are (a) coming up with the correct data model for the object state, (b) coming up with a correct and maintainable organization of URLs, and (c) defining the semantics of each URL. By the time an individual page is constructed, the engineering challenge is over and it doesn't really matter whether you build that script in a simple language (e.g., Perl or Tcl) or a complex powerful language (e.g., Common Lisp or Java). http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.html http://philip.greenspun.com/wtr/aolserver/introduction-1.htm... Philip also discusses this idea in chapter 13 of his classic book, "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" (http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/ http://philip.greenspun.com/panda/). But as Alan Kay points out, this RPC-type model still hasn't evolved to a point where you can pass around self-contained objects that are RCATWD.

malbs 14y ago

Anything I've ever read that Alan Kay has written, either inspires me greatly, or depresses me deeply. His POV is worth 80 IQ quote is something I live by. It applies to _every_ aspect of life. Then you listen to him talk about computer science, computing in general, and what the future might hold, and you end up wondering why we're using languages today that are essentially prettied up versions of languages 40 and 50 years old (sweeping generalisation!)

malbs 14y ago
reading that back, damn, the "depresses me deeply" is a terrible exaggeration, making light of anyone who actually suffers from genuine depression.
- talaketu 14y ago
  come now... not all depression is clinical.
olliesaunders 14y ago
I don’t really understand what he means by the POV quote. Could you explain it?

mike_ivanov 14y ago

The author lost me here: "Which didn’t even require inheritance, which is not like we know it today".

endlessvoid94 14y ago

What network protocol did the ARPA network at PARC use?

martinced 14y ago

My new favorite from Alan Kay, which I just learned from TFA: "Lisp: greatest single programming language ever designed" My previous favorite quote attributed to Alan Kay, which is not in TFA: "I made up the term "object-oriented", and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind." : )

warmfuzzykitten 14y ago

It's a small thing, I know, but the author's use of "orientated" for "oriented" was a bit annoying. Other than that, it's a nice collection of quotes and links. Good to see.

elviejo 14y ago

Alan Kay is a voice that we need to listen more... we are distracted from the fact that our current Industry generates a lot of money... too look at the fact that our Craft is in the pyramid construction age.... we need real architecture and real engineering.

drpepper 14y ago

I'd love to get a hold of that Bob Barton article Alan Kay talks about, but strangely it seems like all the PDFs of it have been taken down...

mythz 14y ago
The revolutionary 1961 Bob Barton paper Alan Kay was referring to was called "A new approach to the functional design of a digital computer". Here's a copy of it on Scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000 http://www.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000
- drpepper 14y ago
  Great!

ternaryoperator 14y ago

Surprised not to see any quotes from Dr. Dobb's interview with Kay from 2012 ( http://www.drdobbs.com/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/240003442 ) Some quotes from that interview: "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." "Extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in a way they don't deserve." "I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the wheel, you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward. If they reinvented what Engelbart did we'd be way ahead of where we are now." and so on...

ned11 14y ago

Good article. I Just translated it into Chinese and posted that in my blog(http://ned11.iteye.com/blog/1828088 http://ned11.iteye.com/blog/1828088). Thanks for the introduction to such a great people.