[HN Gopher] Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal co...
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Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing
Author : yarapavan
Score : 195 points
Date : 2021-10-17 07:54 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.notion.so)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.notion.so)
| moocowtruck wrote:
| i think the most interesting part about this post is the
| constitution using f's where s's would be and the history behind
| it lol
| locallost wrote:
| > They're all about this idea, which most programmers have that's
| wrong, is that you're going to write the program the right way.
| Nothing's going to be wrong. The whole idea is to make a fucking
| mess.
|
| I think he's great and I've learned a lot from him, but this is
| where I immediately disagreed. But it got me thinking and I
| realized it's because the stuff I work on is mostly a solved
| problem. So I think people that reimplement stuff that already
| exists have this schtick about making it correctly, clean and
| efficient. He was mostly working on things really new so it had
| to be a mess. I just hate that the stuff I work on is a mess
| anyway even though it's nothing special at all.
| cdrini wrote:
| Oh I very strongly resonated with that! This was one of the two
| quotes I wrote down from the interview. One thing I notice when
| I see artists works or when I'm working on an artistic project
| of my own is that the project is absolutely ugly for 80% of the
| process. It takes a lot of changing, tweaking, adjustments, and
| sometimes also an unreasonable amount of fine detail work to
| get something that looks good; and then a ton more work to get
| something that looks great. That's what he means by "mess" I
| think; all projects should start as a mess, and
| develop/grow/iterate into something more beautiful.
|
| I find programmers tend to operate less iteratively, and more
| like engineering, where you need to come up with a good
| solution before implementing it, because in engineering you
| can't undo, and costs are high to make changes after a certain
| point. The analogy I like is: programming is often compared to
| engineering/construction, but is perhaps better represented by
| gardening; it's got a much more organic nature and flexibility.
| rektide wrote:
| steve yeggie's politican axis of software development comes
| hard to mind. https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
|
| at work yeah, we all naturally want a very defensive, safe,
| territory. we dont want volatility & risk in our running, cash
| making systems.
|
| it might be helpful to reflect on thr lifecycles of software
| development. Pioneers, settlers, & town planners comes to mind
| as a useful model, of the changing approaches as software
| established itself over time.
|
| https://mobile.twitter.com/swardley/status/10875115450918993...
|
| i'm really really warmed to hear that you were able to put
| yourself in the shoes of those who came before, those who were
| charged with building something out of nothing. most of us join
| fairly established entities, and we do not see the drive-to-
| make through the strong, powerful point of view of those trying
| to get create, those trying to get started.
|
| when Alan Kay &all talk about personal computing, to me, it is
| much more a domain of will & creation & whimsy than the
| controlled, regularized, predictable processes we aim for when
| we professionals are building & elaborating our paid,
| industrial computing work.
| radiowave wrote:
| An interesting dynamic here is that, having read Yeggie's
| article years back, I regarded Smalltalk as being somewhere
| towards the conservative end of the axis (at least, in
| comparison to other dynamic languages.) E.g.: variables
| declared before use, no truthiness, very few automatic type
| conversions. It results in a system with a high degree of
| internal consistency.
|
| And yet, the goal of the language is to enable activity at
| the liberal end of the axis.
|
| So maybe there's a more subtle goal: you have to enable
| someone to make a mess, but also equip them to get out of
| that mess into something more structured, as and when that
| becomes useful.
|
| As a counter example, spreadsheets are wonderful for making a
| messy solution to certain kinds of problems - but how do you
| then it them into a spreadsheet that _isn 't_ a mess? I don't
| know that I've ever seen that happen - it seems like the
| right means of abstraction and combination to enable that to
| happen just don't exist in spreadsheet-land.
| igouy wrote:
| "LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function"
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-
| ult...
| radiowave wrote:
| It happens that you don't get the insight into how to do
| something right until after you've made a few messes. I think
| Kay takes the view that the act of generating that insight is
| ultimately more valuable than the act of producing any one
| particular software artefact.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Now let's apply that insight to the subproblems of your
| problem. And then to the subproblems of those subproblems.
|
| The way I see it, the tools we use to program - all the way
| from IDEs through programming languages to the very way we
| code in plaintext - make the process too damn slow, the
| feedback loop way too long. Messing around, trying and
| modifying and retrying until you get something good, it all
| takes too long, so we hardly do it.
| ssivark wrote:
| Because for the PARC folks from back in the day, the true
| vision for personal computing was to enable lots of people to
| do new things. That's why Kay laments that the personal
| computing revolution is yet to happen.
| [deleted]
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Was this interview edited? If so, it seems to have been badly
| edited. Listening to the recording, I noticed one part in
| particular, where he's talking about catalysts in inorganic
| chemical reactions, and then he's talking about non-trivial
| engineering artifacts. If you listen closely, it sounds like a
| bad edit. This is at about 41:48.
| neilv wrote:
| > _There are so many more rabbit holes I would have liked to go
| down, but I think we 're at our time now. So, thank you so much
| Alan for coming on the show. This was really fun._
|
| If Alan Kay willing to keep talking, why not keep him talking?
| You could turn it into a two-parter for whatever the show format
| is.
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| Although Quora seems widely disdained here, I'd recommend
| asking him any follow-up questions there, where he's pretty
| responsive.
| cercatrova wrote:
| What a fascinating interview, I thought it was going to be all
| about tech but seems like Alan Kay knows a thing or two about
| political science as well.
| mikewarot wrote:
| The group of 35 people working to gather ideas, discuss,
| annotate, combine and edit, then send off to the printers to be
| typeset overnight, then repeating the process is a fascinating
| detail of how the US Constitution was built that I really,
| _really_ wish they had taught in school.
|
| I always think of it as this old fashioned scroll thing with the
| weird letter S in it.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I love it because it reframes the process to be as high-tech
| and as ultra-modern as they could make it at the time.
| [deleted]
| dddw wrote:
| These notion articles are quite nice imo.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| It's also an amazing hiring ad. Apart from just being a cool
| and interesting product, stuff like this convinces me that the
| notion people have their head in the right place. Unfortunately
| I can't work in the states or I would've applied to them
| already.
| KnobbleMcKnees wrote:
| I adore notion and will unironically shill it for them at any
| appropriate moment.
|
| so, er, yeah. GET NOTION.
| jackdh wrote:
| I enjoyed notion but stopped using it mainly due to the bad
| offline functionality (and occasionally getting randomly
| logged out).
|
| Has this been improved yet? (Desktop|IOS App)
| olah_1 wrote:
| You should really look at Anytype[1]. It is basically a
| better version of Notion[2] that uses IPFS and your social
| network to back up your data.
|
| [1]: https://anytype.io
|
| [2]: because it is offline-first and has things like named
| relations, so you can connect information in any custom way
| that you like.
| d3nj4l wrote:
| No, offline is still almost non-existent.
| Hnus wrote:
| I don't get how people can use notion for personal info or
| basically anything else if you are not forced to use it at
| work. Not even considering that your most personal
| information (journal, health log etc.) you don't share
| anywhere else twitter, facebook is stored in plaintext
| somewhere and can be used however they want according to
| their privacy policy which some nothing-to-hide folks might
| ok with but that everything you have written can go poof any
| second is nuts IMHO.
| nbzso wrote:
| People want a modern and cool tools with bangs and
| whistles. They 'have nothing to hide', they trust 'SaaS' as
| a collective agreement on "advancement' and 'inevitable
| mandatory future'.
|
| Corporations want data and control over UX. I see this as a
| happy relationship between owners with knowledge and slaves
| with lack of survival instinct.
|
| I can accept some form of work related security risk (Hi,
| Figma) but in general cannot give my intellectual property
| and businesses processes on any third party. In my company
| all the process tools are strictly FOSS and under my
| control.
|
| Personally speaking, tools as Notion cannot hold a candle
| on my Emacs org-mode workflow. You don't need to reinvent
| the wheel every 10 years just to feel "cool" and "modern".
|
| But hey it's a business, they have happy users and money
| whats more to ask for? Right?
| uxcolumbo wrote:
| > Notion cannot hold a candle on my Emacs org-mode
| workflow
|
| More details on this? Anywhere I can read up on this.
|
| I like your principle - not to trust these SaaS tools
| with your personal data.
| np32 wrote:
| Devon Zuegel is a great thinker in a large breath of subjects
| ->
|
| On Urbanism:
|
| Her podcast Order without Design [0] where she interviews the
| Bertaud couple
|
| Fields note on Miami [1] (with beautiful pictures)
|
| Metamuse interview on cities [2]
|
| and a lot more on her blog
|
| On tech :
|
| She was the PM for Github sponsors (and I believe other open-
| source friendly projects), great interview of her by the
| changelog [4]
|
| The Pioneer series (of which this interview is an episod),
| favorites are Louis Pouzing and roundtable about Hamming [5]
|
| [0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/order-without-
| design-h...
|
| [1] https://devonzuegel.com/post/field-notes-miami
|
| [2] https://museapp.com/podcast/33-cities/
|
| [3] https://changelog.com/podcast/370
|
| [4] https://www.notion.so/blog/topic/pioneers
| [deleted]
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Every time Alan Kay speaks, I get smarter.
|
| And I don't mean "smarter" in a ted talk way.
| wsjtho55 wrote:
| He lost me when he started going on about "what's wrong with
| our brains".
|
| I have not given Alan Kay permission to declare me broken.
|
| His computing skills are legend, but he's not a god.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Such a great interview! Or rather, pontification:
|
| > See, what I'm doing here is I'm not conversing. I really can't
| converse very well at my age because I've lost my patience. So,
| what I do is pontificate, which is the same as giving you
| something like it's written.
|
| > This is why experienced programmers have big multiple screens.
| They're working on something where the result is going to be fit
| on one screen, but you have to have all this other stuff, it's
| like when you make an arch; it's not just piling up the bricks,
| you have to put this whole scaffolding up. You have to hold
| everything together until you get the keystone in place. And
| virtually all of the productivity tools that I've seen, I'll just
| say, "all" because I haven't seen all of them, but the ones I
| have seen, they just completely don't understand this at all.
| They're all about this idea, which most programmers have that's
| wrong, is that you're going to write the program the right way.
| Nothing's going to be wrong. The whole idea is to make a fucking
| mess. And if you look at the way Disney artists do things, the
| whole thing is messy. This is something anybody in the arts knows
| completely about, and hardly anybody in computing knows anything
| about. But in fact, it's a key factor in building a good
| interactive development environment.
|
| > We were a floor culture at PARC so we not only had the bean
| bags instead of chairs. Why bean bags? Well, you can't leap to
| your feet to denounce somebody from a bean bag.
|
| This seemed an odd error: when Alan says (I presume) Feynman, the
| text has "Feinman" and links to a Richard Feinman.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| _" If the professors of English will complain to me that the
| students who come to the universities, after all those years of
| study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that
| something's the matter with the way you spell friend."_ -
| Richard P. Feynman
|
| The mislink is probably a rushed final editing pass.
| [deleted]
| rjsw wrote:
| Most of the transcripts of computing interviews that I see
| could use some proofreading by people who know the subject.
| lincpa wrote:
| The "object-oriented programming" has no mathematical model
| support. So it cannot prove its scientificity.
|
| My "The Grand Unified Programming Theory: The Pure Function
| Pipeline Data Flow with Principle-based Warehouse/Workshop Model"
| is based on the simple, classic, and widely used in social
| production practice, elementary school mathematics "water
| input/output of the pool" as a mathematical prototype, Therefore,
| it is scientific.
|
| https://github.com/linpengcheng/PurefunctionPipelineDataflow
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