alankay1

23 ms·

211.
by alankay1 10y ago
I'm not a huge fan of this particular approach (interesting as it is ...)
212.
by alankay1 10y ago
"There aren't any really good ones" -- so computing major students especially should have to learn 4 or 5 very different ones and write fairly major systems in them. We should take another pass at design for both majors and n
213.
by alankay1 10y ago
Let's give Dan Ingalls the majority of the credit here. I will admit to "seeing" what was possible, but Dan was able to make really great compromises between what Should Be vs what would allow us to make great progress in
214.
by alankay1 10y ago
Sure.
215.
by alankay1 10y ago
I think one of the biggest blindnesses of our field is scaling (and I'm not sure quite why). This leads to an enormous amount of effort at roughly the same scales of some good ideas decades ago. (I think my background in molecular biol
216.
by alankay1 10y ago
Chris was fun to work with!
217.
by alankay1 10y ago
Steve was not the kind of person to have friends, but he and I were "pretty friendly" right up until his death -- this is partly because our lives intertwined closely a few times -- not just for Apple, but also for Pixar, and then
218.
by alankay1 10y ago
Our most unrealistic assumption was that when presented with really good ideas most people will most definitely learn and use them to make progress. In reality, only a tiny percentage can do this, and it is an enormous amount of work to dea
219.
by alankay1 10y ago
The problems with most arguments is that they arguers assume they are in a valid context (this is usually not the case, and this is the central problem of "being rational"). Another way to look at it is "Forget about trying t
220.
by alankay1 10y ago
It's a big problem along many dimensions. A good start is to try to get a handle on what you think should be required. One hint is to forget about vocational goals and focus on "adults as real citizens in a large diverse society&q
221.
by alankay1 10y ago
What are the three best books you've read on teaching anything to kids? Let me know, and we'll start from there.
222.
by alankay1 10y ago
A good heuristic for designing programming languages is to try to take the largest most complicated kinds of things you want to do, work them out, and then see if there is a "language lurking". Most people make the big mistake of
223.
by alankay1 10y ago
This is a perfect example of "systems blindness" in the face of real scaling. What should a browser actually know in order to scale (and why didn't the browser folks realize this? (rhetorical question) -- this knowledge was a
224.
by alankay1 10y ago
And ... ????
225.
by alankay1 10y ago
Sure!
226.
by alankay1 10y ago
We were lucky in the ARPA/PARC communities to have both great funding, and the time to think things through (and even make mistakes that were kept from propagating to create bad defacto standards). The question you are asking is really
227.
by alankay1 10y ago
One start to this is not to do "a web browser" -- or other software -- with such bad initial conceptions (see elsewhere above). There was nothing necessary about this. We have a technology in which hacks are easy and can be really
228.
by alankay1 10y ago
One of several major mistakes with the web has to do with thinking that the browser is some kind of application "with features" -- if you think of the actual scale of the Internet (and they didn't) you realize that at the ver
229.
by alankay1 10y ago
I think you are missing what was/is special about Lisp. It's "the idea of Lisp" (and see other places in this AMA where I've said a few more words). The "idea of Java" is not special (and it's not cle
230.
by alankay1 10y ago
You could just be seeing things more or less as they are.
231.
by alankay1 10y ago
But are "the good goals of the past" good enough goals for today and tomorrow?
232.
by alankay1 10y ago
Just to pick three (and maybe not even at the top of my list if I were to write it and sort it), are (a) Intel and Motorola, etc. getting really interested in the Parc HW architectures that allowed Very High Level Languages to be efficientl
233.
by alankay1 10y ago
It means "outside our human prejudices about ourselves". As though we actually were a valid object of real science....
234.
by alankay1 10y ago
Without commenting on Haskell, et al., I think it's important to start with "good models of processes" and let these interact with the best we can do with regard to languages and hardware in the light of these good models. I
235.
by alankay1 10y ago
Engineering is wonderful -- but think of what happened after real science got invented! Today's "computer science" is much more like "library science" than it should be on the one hand, and too much coincident with
236.
by alankay1 10y ago
So many of the questions point up the problems with the format and media for an AMA. So many of the best questions are out of the scope ... But, let's just pick one biggie here: how about taking on "systems" as a lingua franc
237.
by alankay1 10y ago
All cultures have a lot of knowledge -- the bigger influences are contextual and epistemological (i.e. "points of view" and "stance", and "what is valued", etc.) Self-awareness of what we are ("from Ma
238.
by alankay1 10y ago
Or less -- I think UIs have really gone downhill. But, it's also worth looking at places where there's been enough change of one kind or another to constitute "qualitative". This has certainly happened in many areas of e
239.
by alankay1 10y ago
Bob Barton got most of his great ideas in sleeping dreams. Most of my ideas come in "waking dreams" (this is a state that most children indulge in readily, but it can be retained in a more or less useful way -- I don't think
240.
by alankay1 10y ago
Smalltalk was an early attempt at non-command-messages to objects with the realization that you get a "programming language" if you take some care with the conventions used for composing the messages.

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