powerfuloutlet
10 HN recommenders · recommended in 19 months, 2012–2026
1:07:26 · 60K views · Mar 25, 2012
Alan Kay's 2009 UIUC talk arguing that computing is more a pop culture than a science and that ignoring history and fundamentals leads to inferior solutions. He touches on the history of interactive environments and what the web should have been.
A staple on must-watch lists, recommended as a starting point for Kay's thinking and for why software is often poor and ahistorical.
20 comments from Hacker News
Richard Feynman is the best teacher we know (explaining electricity): [LINK] He also explains seeing, heat, electro magnetism, elasticity and mirrors among other things. His academic lectures are just as good but too long and hard for laymen to follow. - Every time I switch on an electrical device I hear Feynman say 'Zzzzinggg' and I see the copper bars jiggling across town. - Every time I see a cup of hot liquid I hear Feynman say "jiggling atoms" - Watch his hands and fingers telling the more accurate science story, simulating the electrons and atoms. - I would say that this the most important video to see for any human being on the planet. De second most important thing would be half of Alan Kay's lectures this video Great video's to watch with your kids! (from 3-4 years and older).
"The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong: [LINK] "Normal Considered Harmful" by Alan Kay: this video
It's funny you say that. This is something Alan Kay talks about at length. For example, watch the first 20 mins of this talk - this video Essentially, he asserts that computing (or computer science even) isn't a real field (like biology or physics). Most people can't name the early computing pioneers whose work they build on (not true in Physics or Biology, we celebrate the pioneers) nor are they familiar with the work that was done in the Xerox PARC days. It's gotten so bad that a lot of computer science research just assumes that what we have now is what's going to remain forever. In the 70's, all kinds of interesting ideas and experiments were tried. Hardware implemented VM's, direct manipulation programming, OS-free computing environments, highly re-configurable computing a la FPGA's, and hundreds more. Nowadays, we think that creating custom ASIC to run machine learning algorithms quicker is innovative and novel. All this to say that many of the ideas in Dynamicland aren't new. They're rooted in ideas that are decades old. If you look at Bret's papers he uses as references frequently, you'll notice how many of them are over 10 years old - [LINK]
You can't fix a broken wheel. This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel. The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why: this video Some of the comments of youtube are fun too. This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better. Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit. The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all: [LINK] [LINK] Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely: Early Croquet demo: [LINK] Croquet in webbrowser: [LINK] Demo of webbrowser replacement: [LINK] Squeak and all its predecessors: [LINK] Etoys: [LINK]
If you're okay with a System 6 appearance, I've already made one < [LINK] >, for Advanced Mac Substitute < [LINK] >. I do appreciate Alan Kay's thinking, in particular his talk "Normal Considered Harmful" < this video > My own high-level language, Varyx, has somewhat LISPy internals and is very dynamic — for example, you can annotate a variable with a type that's determined only at run time — and has an eval() that insulates the caller from the payload and vice versa. You can sequester mutable state within a closure, which can't be cracked open. Using an experimental Varyx build with some bindings for Apple's Core Graphics API, I wrote a script that rendered an arrow cursor (which I donated to the ravynOS project). Perhaps we should talk. :-)