6 ms·

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 indi

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...

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...