[HN Gopher] Alan Kay's talk at UCLA - Feb 21, 2024 [video]
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Alan Kay's talk at UCLA - Feb 21, 2024 [video]
Author : sgoyal
Score : 150 points
Date : 2024-03-06 06:03 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| nomilk wrote:
| I heard of Alan Kay via Steve Jobs's intro of the iPhone [1], but
| otherwise know little about him - can anyone recommend other Alan
| Kay talks/essays/books?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg&t=10m2s
| djmips wrote:
| Can't specifically recommend a talk but here's a menu of Kay
| talks.
|
| https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay
| fermigier wrote:
| I find it mind-boggling that he has been doing this for 50+
| years.
| djmips wrote:
| IKR? I was a very young man and 40 years ago, I went to a
| talk* by Kay who I thought was 'old' at the time (haha) and
| this was already 15 years after he started at Xerox as a 30
| year old! Now it's 2024 and I feel old... It was a pleasure
| to see his talk 40 years ago and awesome to again watch a
| talk today from an 83 year old Kay.
|
| * after the talk, we even shared a cab to the airport and
| he graciously entertained all of my questions.
| Rochus wrote:
| https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/
| vhiremath4 wrote:
| Highly recommend his talk on the power of simplicity. This was
| one of those lightbulb moments for me when I was a younger
| programmer:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs
| justin66 wrote:
| He actively answers questions on Quora and those answers come
| in a format (short length - though his are unusually well
| thought out - and narrow focus) that is easy to browse.
| theGnuMe wrote:
| He's been here on HN as well in the past.
| justin66 wrote:
| His answers on Quora represent a pretty extensive body of
| work. That's not true of his comments here (which are very
| appreciated, of course).
|
| Quora's a better place, with a better UI, for that almost-
| blogging sort of thing.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I think Quora is "a poor imitation of old static text media"
| that's difficult to browse and not very accessible, since it
| takes so much clicking and waiting to open up "more" buttons
| and follow replies and threads, and is impossible to easily
| print, or just scroll, skim, and search through, so I
| collected Alan Kay's answers, some discussion we had, plus
| some more discussion with David Rosenthal (who developed NeWS
| with James Gosling), here:
|
| "Alan Kay on "Should web browsers have stuck to being
| document viewers?" and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and
| HyperCard:
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-
| browser...
|
| >Alan Kay answered: "Actually quite the opposite, if
| "document" means an imitation of old static text media (and
| later including pictures, and audio and video recordings)."
|
| Also here's a collection of HyperTIES discussions from Hacker
| News (including some discussion with Ben Shneiderman about
| why hypertext links are blue):
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-
| hac...
| derekenos wrote:
| My favorite:
|
| Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY
|
| If you're interested in kids + computers + education, this 1955
| Technology in Education House Committee Meeting is a
| surprisingly great watch, and has Kay alongside Seymour Papert:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwsQn1Rs-4A
| chadkeck wrote:
| 1995, not 1955.
| derekenos wrote:
| Ha! Thanks for the correction. Comment's no longer
| editable.
| 6510 wrote:
| The funniest to me was when he was 5 he read about 150 books:
| _" I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were
| lying to me"_
| kragen wrote:
| he elaborates on how concepts and ideas and schooling are
| misleading by nature quite a bit in the talk, though if he
| says that sentence i haven't gotten to it yet. (i've seen him
| say it elsewhere)
|
| https://youtu.be/dZQ7x0-MZcI?t=8m33s 'our minds are like
| theaters. (...) we treat our beliefs as reality. that is the
| worst thing about human beings. and these theaters are tiny;
| we can only think of a few things at once, it's hard for us
| to take in larger things. (...) we grow up in whatever
| culture we were born into. (...) our conclusions tend to be
| societal--that's a disaster!'
|
| https://youtu.be/dZQ7x0-MZcI?t=57m9s 'because our brains want
| to believe, rather than think, these can turn into something
| like a religion. the reason we don't want to come up with
| blind belief: there's always more, and what it is, is
| something that we can't imagine. so when we give a name to
| something, we (...) hurt our ability to think more about it,
| because it already has a set of properties, it already is the
| thing the word denotes.' (beautifully illustrated in the
| video)
|
| https://youtu.be/dZQ7x0-MZcI?t=60m 'school is the best thing
| ever invented to keep you from thinking about something
| important for more than a few minutes'
|
| perhaps unsurprisingly, when i explained this on here two
| days ago, it got downvoted to -2, because hn's comment
| section is kind of the intellectual antithesis of alan kay:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39586470
|
| i keep being optimistic but you people make me so sad
| 6510 wrote:
| It is hard to imagine a discovery so profound as banging 2
| rocks together. Why would you do it?
|
| Where are todays rocks?
| kragen wrote:
| i have some in my head, do you want some?
| mpweiher wrote:
| _The Computer Revolution hasn 't happened yet_, OOPSLA 1997
| keynote
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
|
| Others have already mentioned _The Early History of Smalltalk_
| , highly recommended. You'll probably want to read it a couple
| of times, revisit from time to time.
|
| _The big idea is messaging, or rather "ma"_
|
| http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...
|
| "The key in making great and growable systems is much more to
| design how its modules communicate rather than what their
| internal properties and behaviors should be."
|
| "I think I recall also pointing out that it is vitally
| important not just to have a complete metasystem, but to have
| fences that help guard the crossing of metaboundaries."
|
| " I would say that a system that allowed other metathings to be
| done in the ordinary course of programming (like changing what
| inheritance means, or what is an instance) is a bad design. (I
| believe that systems should allow these things, but the design
| should be such that there are clear fences that have to be
| crossed when serious extensions are made.)"
|
| "I would suggest that more progress could be made if the smart
| and talented Squeak list would think more about what the next
| step in metaprogramming should be -- how can we get great
| power, parsimony, AND security of meaning?"
| e12e wrote:
| From the sibling link, I'd highlight:
|
| Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas at TED (2007)
| https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Alan_Kay:_A_powerful_idea...
|
| Alan Kay: Normal Considered Harmful (2009)
| https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Alan_Kay:_Normal_Consider...
|
| Back to the Future of Software Development (2003)
| https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Back_to_the_Future_of_Sof...
|
| All of the STEPS reports - I especially like appendix E in:
|
| https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2007008_steps.pdf
|
| > Appendix E: Extended Example: A Tiny TCP/IP Done as a Parser
| (by Ian Piumarta)
|
| > Our first task is to describe the format of network packets.
| Perfectly good descriptions already exist in the various IETF
| Requests For Comments (RFCs) in the form of "ASCII-art
| diagrams". This form was probably chosen because the structure
| of a packet is immediately obvious just from glancing at the
| pictogram.
|
| > If we teach our programming language to recognize pictograms
| as definitions of accessors for bit fields within structures,
| our program is the clearest of its own meaning. The following
| expression cre- ates an IS grammar that describes ASCII art
| diagrams.
|
| > (...) We can now define accessors for the fields of an IP
| packet header simply by drawing its structure.
| nomilk wrote:
| Thanks a lot for this (and to other posters). 20 minutes into
| _Normal Considered Harmful_ and can tell I 'm going to binge
| watch/listen to Kay over the next few weeks. Extremely
| appreciative.
| el_memorioso wrote:
| Alan Kay won the Turing Award in 2003 for, "For pioneering many
| of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented
| programming languages, leading the team that developed
| Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal
| computing." His Dynabook [1], developed during the 70s, is the
| predecessor of modern tablets and laptops.
| boxfire wrote:
| The idea of computing as the shared stage to reflect our own
| intelligence is really what sticks out to me as the best way to
| frame what interacting with a computer means. It's not new but
| Alan did a great job of motivating and framing it here. Thanks
| for posting this great reminder that what we use as computers
| today are still only poor imitations of what could truly be done
| if we can transport our minds to be more directly players on that
| stage. It's interesting to reflect the other way as well. If we
| are the actors reflecting a computer to itself. An AGI has to
| imagine and reflect in a space created of our ideas. To be native
| the AI needs better tools, the "mouse" of it's body controlling
| the closed loop of it's "graphics", how do we create such a space
| that is more directly shared? Dynamically trading been actor and
| audience in an improvisational exchange? This is the human
| computer symbiosis I seek.
| djmips wrote:
| I feel like the LLM interface will enable that. I wonder what
| Alan Kay makes of the current LLM revolution (he does talk a
| bit about it in the question section @ around 1:35)
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| I am a big fan of just in time on the fly UI and LLMs seem to
| make that possible now with some of the fast token outputs
| there are a couple of experiments [1]using image for now and
| I expect this to be more useful in not too long.
|
| [1] https://twitter.com/sincethestudy/status/1761099508853944
| 383...
| d_tr wrote:
| A first-class programming language (not an LLM) to talk to the
| computer's OS along with a rich library is the most important
| missing component IMO.
|
| Humans communicate mainly with language and no OS provides this
| in a satisfactory way for the average user.
|
| The result is users mostly clicking on signs to choose among
| predetermined tasks, like monkeys in a lab.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| That's because computers are dumb servants. And that's a good
| thing, because computer solutions should be task specific.
| The human has agency and sometimes imagination, and the
| computer's job is to solve a problem as transparently as
| possible with as little cognitive load as possible.
|
| Human language is optimised for human _relationships_ , not
| for task-specific problem solving. It's full of subtext,
| context, and implication.
|
| As soon as you try to use natural language for general open-
| ended problem solving you get lack of clarity and unintended
| consequences. At best you'll have to keep repeating the
| request until you get what you want, at worst you'll get a
| disaster you didn't consider.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| There are things about human language that are fundamentally
| at odds with effective communication with a computer (or
| engineering in general).
|
| One example is ambiguity. Every human language has faculties
| for ambiguity, which is crucial in many human interactions
| and relationships. The ability to make implicit requests or
| suggestions while maintaining plausible deniability is
| valuable, even in situations that are non-adversarial.
|
| In contrast, when communicating with an OS or engineering a
| mechanical device, ambiguity is a negative and it's crucial
| to use language that is deterministic.
|
| There is a very real degree to which people are only capable
| of thinking clearly about complex systems to the degree they
| are comfortable with tools such as mathematics and
| programming that can be used to unambiguously describe them.
| pilgrim0 wrote:
| I agree. I think one way to achieve that is to first
| acknowledge the important distinction between modes of
| programming and levels of abstraction. See, even in
| programming, we're still restricted to a given domain. A web
| dev does not program to the network stack, thus needs not to
| known NICs and TCP frames internals. The web dev only
| interacts with the lower levels via high level parameters
| (data) through the low level APIs, which are already done and
| settled, not directly with code. The same goes for each layer
| and domain. Now, expecting users to write actual code is not
| realistic or sustainable. What's more reasonable is to
| imagine a scenario where users needs only to give the
| parameters for the functions which are already done and
| settled. So, composing super high level functions in an
| environment which disposes of an extensive library of
| utilities seems the way to go. Users already do
| parameterization everyday, such as when they press buttons
| and fill forms. What's missing is simply an abstraction which
| gives them the power to compose those functions. Regarding
| the paradigmatic framing for an end user language, I think
| stack-based programming offers a superior model, because the
| context window is directly visible and easy to track and
| reason, but more than that, stack languages offer a good
| avenue for learning, since it's the easiest model to teach by
| analogy, even physical analogies can be made. It boils down
| to just pushing and popping in a coherent order. The order of
| operations is in fact the program. Hard to beat this
| simplicity and universality.
| nanna wrote:
| Wonderful as ever.
|
| Kay demonstrates an emulator of Sketchpad. Anyone know if it's
| been shared anywhere?
| asolove wrote:
| Also very curious about this. I've been slowly building one
| myself and would happily give up if another good one already
| exists. Tried searching the web and can't find it.
| skadamat wrote:
| I wish we had a popular operating system for end users like
| ourselves that was "live" all the way down.
|
| It's unfortunate we've been stuck with Windows, Mac, and Linux
| only
| nanna wrote:
| Live in what sense?
|
| To me Emacs fits the bill, or at least a subset thereof.
| skadamat wrote:
| With a live programming model:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding
| andsoitis wrote:
| Pharo (a Smalltalk), is listed in that article as an
| example of a live programming environment.
|
| Alan Kay is one of the designers of SmallTalk.
| skadamat wrote:
| Yeah I like Pharo
| nanna wrote:
| It would be cool to be able to just click on anything and
| adjust its code to however you like it. I guess that
| Smalltalk and its descendants allow this. But so does
| Emacs. It's not an operating system, but it covers a lot of
| the use-cases.
| hasmanean wrote:
| You would need live routing of messages. And the ability
| to reroute, filter, inject messages dynamically into
| code.
|
| Why must everything be done as a function call? You can't
| change anything without recompiling the code.
|
| Today everything is implemented as a function call. Need
| to send a message? Call a function named "snd_msg" or
| something.
| wslh wrote:
| People are different, that is why flame wars like Emacs vs. Vi
| still exists. It is incredible that we tend to assume that
| there ahould be just one technical response to problems.
| linguae wrote:
| I have the same dream. A part of me wishes Richard Stallman set
| out on making a Lisp OS instead of making a Unix clone, but
| this was the mid-1980s and thus I understand the technical
| limitations and the social environment of the time. The 1990s
| could've been a better time; workstations and commodity PCs
| were powerful enough to run an entire Lisp or Smalltalk
| operating system, and there would've been substantial interest
| in such a system. Imagine had we ended up with a free, open
| source Lisp or Smalltalk OS running on the Pentium and PowerPC
| machines of the era as an alternative to Linux and the BSDs. I
| think this would've been an easier foundation to develop a FOSS
| desktop instead of the X11/KDE/GNOME/Wayland situation we have
| today.
|
| But the dream isn't dead. If only I had more free time...
| javier_e06 wrote:
| Thank you for the story.
|
| My take away is the the concept that GUIs Mirror our minds as
| individuals the way good writing and theater does. I then ponder
| about what could be a fair or useful representation of a
| collective mind in a way an individual mind can process/work-
| with?
|
| Maybe that is the will be the metaverse(snowcrash).
|
| Thanks again.
| angiosperm wrote:
| There are sound reasons why no substantial system in common use
| is coded in Smalltalk. Kay _could_ have spent the decades since
| his time at PARC figuring out why, and remedying them.
|
| One of the reasons is that O-O is just one of several important
| ways discovered to organize software. Any big enough problem will
| have places for each. Specialization is for insects.
| kragen wrote:
| you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did
| some substantial research into some of the other important ways
| to organize software, including things like array languages,
| david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and
| cooperating communities of specialized solvers. in this talk,
| he also mentioned gelernter's tuple-space architecture, though
| you may have missed it. he definitely isn't arguing that oo
| should be the universal way to build everything, much less
| smalltalk; he's lamenting that no better paradigm than their
| research prototype has emerged since then
|
| however, i do agree that there are some advances made since
| then that he doesn't fully appreciate, things like the
| importance of free-software licensing, roy fielding's work on
| architectural styles, recent advances in formal methods and
| functional programming, and the web's principle of least power
| angiosperm wrote:
| And static type calculus as seen in the MLs, Haskell, and
| lately C++.
| kragen wrote:
| yes, although recent advances in functional programming and
| formal methods go a lot further than that
| linguae wrote:
| This is really interesting; it's really cool to think
| about the "statics" and "dynamics" of programming, and I
| while I have a basic understanding of functional
| programming (both the dynamic world of Scheme and the
| static world of languages like Standard ML and Haskell),
| I'm unfamiliar with these recent advances in functional
| programming and formal analysis. I'm wondering if you
| could share some links or references to some of this
| material?
| kragen wrote:
| i'm not the best person to ask, and i don't really know
| where to start
|
| tla+ is getting uptake in industry, idris is sort of
| making dependent types practical, acl2 has more and more
| stuff in it, pvs is still around and still improving,
| adam chlipala keeps blogging cool stuff, so does hillel
| wayne, sel4 is an entire formally-proven-secure
| microkernel, you can try compcert on godbolt's compiler
| explorer, l@an has formalized significant mathematical
| definitions that working mathematicians use actively
| while metamath has an extremely convincing approach to
| proof and an ever-growing body of proofs of basic math,
| smt solvers like z3 are able to solve bigger and bigger
| problems and therefore able to tackle bigger subproblems
| of verifying software (and are easily apt installable and
| callable from python or from cprover's cbmc),
| cryptocurrency smart contracts have an incentive to be
| correct in a way that no previous software did (and
| people are applying at least idris to at least ethereum),
| ...
|
| a thing i saw recently that was really impressive to me
| was parsley, by the main author of pvs as well as some
| other people: http://spw20.langsec.org/papers/parsley-
| langsec2020.pdf
| pjmlp wrote:
| The reason is called Java, and having all key Smalltalk vendors
| pivoting into Java.
|
| Smalltalk was the ".NET" of OS/2, and Visual Age for Smalltalk
| code browser still lives on Eclipse.
|
| Then there are those Objective-C and Ruby developers still
| around, heavily influenced from Smalltalk.
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| Wow, this guy Vannevar Bush was the definition of being early:
|
| > Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with
| a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be
| dropped into the memex and there amplified.
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