Kenneth Friedman
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 9 months, 2016–2023
1:37:45 · 44K views · Apr 29, 2015
A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.
HN recommends it as a favourite tech talk full of good ideas from forgotten 1980s software, worth watching in full.
10 comments from Hacker News
> Visualizations are great for shared intuition, but it should only be used at the end of a long personal struggle which should involve hours upon hours of undistracted effort, preferably involving something tactile like a pen and pencil. There is a classic Alan Kay talk that touches on this very issue, called "Doing With Images Makes Symbols." It discusses what the true power of HCI really is: that complex ideas (or even "unthinkable" ones) can be expressed via HCI using some combination of visual, kinesthetic, and symbolic reasoning. The whole talk is well worth watching, but here is the part I feel is most relevant for Victor's point: this video
I'm already trying hard not to fall into full alankayism [1] and this only reinforces my view. Jobs said that many people in companies are clueless... [1] for people that never watched his talk where he demonstrates how pretty old and forgotten software can be, enjoy this fully this video
Doing with Images Makes Symbols, Alan Kay. this video The title says it all. It's really a summary of several software systems with good ideas abound. I believe all the software is 80s or prior. Edit: I also forgot to mention some psychology and math.
Dang, Alan Kay's old talks are so amazing. Check out this Smalltalk program written in 1975 by a 12-year-old girl. this video
So many things I could say about this, but I"ll let Alan Kay speak for me - this video Alan talks about how ideas in Calculus could be manifested from an early age and a richness in understanding built up as they aged up: - at very young ages, kids really respond well through "doing" / the enactive channel. When asked to draw a circle, kids in Papert's group would first emulate what a LOGO turtle would do by rotating their body in a circle (making tiny increments in x and y). - as they got a bit older, the visual / iconic channel was more developed and they could understand the abstraction of a circle on pencil/paper and how the concepts carried over there - closer to early teens, symbols were much easier to grasp and relate to, etc. With this context in mind, there have been some cool efforts to mix the second and third channels I just mentioned to communicate advanced math concepts. Vi Hart and Grant Sanderson's youtube channels come to mind. Here are my favorite videos by Grant: - "What does it feel like to invent math": [LINK] - On the visual intuition behind a hard problem on the Putnam exam - "The hardest problem on the hardest test": [LINK] - From vectors to matrices to vector spaces to higher-level ideas like the link between linear algebra and calculus: "Essence of linear algebra" series: [LINK] What I especially like about Grant's videos, is that he often walks through what a mathematician would do, the questions she would ask, etc.