alankay1

17 ms·

121.
by alankay1 10y ago
I've written and talked about this over the last decade or so. I think a huge problem in even thinking about this is that the people who should be thinking about it have gotten very fluent in many ways of "programming" that a
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by alankay1 10y ago
Many valid programs are quite wrong.
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by alankay1 10y ago
Most people confuse "arguing" with "debating".
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by alankay1 10y ago
Take a look at what Sam Altman is doing with YC Research.
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by alankay1 10y ago
What are the most important purposes for our living in a society?
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by alankay1 10y ago
Sure -- and you have my permission to make things more clear in the process!
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by alankay1 10y ago
Just to say one more time here: the central idea is "meaning", and "data" has no meaning without "process" (you can't even distinguish a fly spec from an intentional mark without a process. One of many per
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by alankay1 10y ago
I was a big fan of science fiction in the 40s and 50s -- pretty much literally "read everything" -- and tapered off in the 60s -- partly because science was taking more of my time than science fiction, and partly because in many a
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by alankay1 10y ago
There are several questions here. A prime UI design principle -- which is also an education principle -- is that you have to start where the learners/users are. ("All learning happens on the fringes of what you know" -- David
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by alankay1 10y ago
My favorite Alexander book by far is "Notes on a Synthesis of Form" (which he has disavowed ...)
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by alankay1 10y ago
Yes, and I don't really. An interesting one that has been around for a few years -- that can be used by the general public, children, etc. -- is NetLogo (a takeoff from StarLogo). There is also a StarLogo Nova that is worth looking at.
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by alankay1 10y ago
I think this is "still to be done" and "still extremely important"
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by alankay1 10y ago
Sure ...
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by alankay1 10y ago
Their larger goals are important.
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by alankay1 10y ago
Take a look at the Internet itself -- and then take a look at Dave Reed's 1978 PhD thesis at MIT (can be found via the CSAIL website) -- we used many of these ideas in the Croquet project
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by alankay1 10y ago
Lots ... Molecular Biology of the Cell Notes on a Synthesis of Form etc
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by alankay1 10y ago
Worth comparing to Dan Ingalls' Lively Kernel https://www.lively-kernel.org/
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by alankay1 10y ago
I like "computer science" when doing real "computer science". Science is making explanatory models from and about phenomena and looking for more phenomena. Most of the time I think I'm "designing". In Engl
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by alankay1 10y ago
Most of what is between most people's ears
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by alankay1 10y ago
Sure ...
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by alankay1 10y ago
And, early adopters will often adopt poor ideas -- they are mostly just early.
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by alankay1 10y ago
Tell me the stories, and I'll comment on them. If you are computing on a $1000 computer, you are computing in the past. Part of the idea here is that you want to do research and development on supercomputers of the present that will gi
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by alankay1 10y ago
Hi Mark Actually, this is not quite true about Smalltalk code (which is linked to its class). But referring to things is also done via variables and selectors of various kinds, and these are names which have to be locally known. Smalltalk c
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by alankay1 10y ago
A big part of getting into reading is making choices of "this book, this time". And finding ways to do lots of reading (of pretty much anything ...)
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by alankay1 10y ago
Keep on turning the crank ... What if you need something but don't know its name or URL? Etc.
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by alankay1 10y ago
Modularity is: what is the minimum you need to know to make use of a module, and what is the minimum that a module needs to know to help you? Making this good is one of the secrets of scaling
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by alankay1 10y ago
I didn't mean "look" but what they do for the user ...
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by alankay1 10y ago
It would be very good if we starting to do real engineering and real science wrt software and most design ...
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by alankay1 10y ago
Why don't you try to pick a few, and I'll try to comment?
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by alankay1 10y ago
There was quite a bit of discussion about this on the HN gig about my long ago "reading list"

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