Colin McDonnell
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2016–2026
56:39 · 36K views · Jun 17, 2015
An Alan Kay talk on programming and scaling, covering theoretical limits of code size, engineering versus tinkering, and biological cells as inspiration for object-oriented design.
HN fans call it one of Kay's best talks and recommend it for rethinking why programming paradigms have barely changed.
8 comments from Hacker News
These aren't necessarily my absolute favorite talks, but they're great mind-altering talks a little off the beaten path so I'd like to highlight them: "Writing A Thumb Drive From Scratch" by Travis Goodspeed - [LINK] Excellent talk on the hardware side of security, goes into some really cool theoretical hard disk defense stuff, incredibly insightful and introduces a hardware security tech toy so fun you'll want to go out and order it the moment you're done watching. The speaker is entertaining as all heck to boot. "Programming and Scaling" by Alan Kay - this video Interesting talk on the theoretical limits of code size and engineering versus tinkering. Also talks a lot about Alan Kay's philosophy of computer science which analogizes systems to biological systems, which are the systems with the largest proven scaling on the planet. "The Mother Of All Demos" by Douglas Engelbart - [LINK] This talk is so prescient you won't believe your eyes. Given in 1968, Douglas demonstrates just about every major computing concept in use today on a modern machine, along with some ones that are still experimental or unevenly distributed such as smooth remote desktop and collaborative editing.
This is one of my favorite Alan Kay talks of all time (I think this is the right version, but at the time it wasn't on YouTube)... Programming and Scaling - Alan Kay this video There's also one where he discusses anthropology and the human universals, but the title of that talk has escaped me for years. Anyone remember what that one's called?
Check out Alan Kay's perspective on this [0]. This talk is excellent and will cue you in on how to go about thinking about the fact that the way we program and view and understand computers, with the exception of recent advances in neural networks/LLMs, has followed largely unchanged for the past 65 or so years. [0] this video
Reminds me of some Alan Kay talks: this video He actually mentions the book that is the source for the first illustration in the article. He also often talks about the speed of molecules and how it's counter-intuitive to the commonplace idea of cell operation. Cell biology was an inspiration for original OOP (which wasn't much like Java/C++ at all). When reading about Covid stuff and immunity, I often think how these mechanism could be imitated in engineering. I definitely believe there are some general principles that we could benefit from without trying to "simulate" biology. Edit: Sorry, same author/illustrator, but different book.
You're all over the place here and your arguments make no sense whatsoever when examined. First, you conflate mass-appeal with some sort of objective "better" criterion which is of course bonkers. To use one of your own examples against you, there are hundreds of thousands of Java monkeys out there that are using glue other people made to tie together rocks to build stonewalls. Which do fail as soon as the weather stops being nice. Security (you should look into Java deserialization bugs), reliability, performance what do they know about any of these things? Second, you conflate late-binding as present in Lisp and Smalltalk with late-binding present in other dynamic languages. The two are not equivalent, a perfect example of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Lisp and Smalltalk will never become popular (read my previous comment), but that does not mean that they do not sit on an apex and still have a lot to give. To anyone interested in the "craft of programming", "the Art", there is nothing better period. Here are some references for you, from the masters themselves: [1] [LINK] [2] this video [3] [LINK]