Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

Do you think we're yet at a position where we could catalog a set of "primitives" that are foundational to programming systems? (Where "systems" are fundamentally distributed and independent of software platform, programming language or hardware implementation)

I have three questions -

1. If you were to design a new programming paradigm today using what we have learnt about OOP what would it be?

2. With VR and AR (Hololens) becoming a reality (heh) how do you see user interfaces changing to work better with these systems? What new things need to be invented or rethought?

3. I also worked at Xerox for a number of years although not at PARC. I was always frustrated by their attitude to new ideas and lack of interest in new technologies until everyone else was doing it. Obviously businesses change over time and it has been a long time since Xerox were a technology leader. If you could pick your best and worst memories from Xerox what would they be?

Cheers for your time and all your amazing work over the years :)

Q: How do you think we can improve todays world (not just with technology)? What do you think is our species way forward? How as a civilization can we 'get to higher level'? Specifically, I'm interested in your views on ending poverty, suffering, not destroying the Earth, improving our political and social systems, improving education etc. I understand that these are very broad topics without definitive answers but I'd love to hear some of your thought about these.

Thank you and I just want to mention that I appreciate your work.

Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?

Should AP's new "CS Principles" course count towards the math requirement for college admission?

Who are "humanistic technologists" you admire? Critics, artists, experimenters, even trolls... Which especially creative technologists inspire you?

I imagine people like Jonathan Harris, Ze Frank, Jaron Lanier, Ben Huh, danah boyd, Sherry Turkle, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Rushkoff, etc....

How can we apply to join the HARC and make the Dynabook a reality?

Do you think the object ~ biological cells metaphor can be related somehow to automated programming using GP or neural networks? (I've sometimes imagined neural networks as networks of many small objects with probability-based inheritance)

Do you think that any factors that were significant back then are going to be difficult to reproduce now, as HARC gets started? Conversely are there novel aspects of today's environment that you wished for at PARC?

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSGEjv3Tqo0&t=6m

Do you think we'll ever have a programming language that isn't fully text based and gets closer to a direct mapping of our own thoughts than current systems? If so any ideas what properties this language would have?

2. (This question is about interactive coding, as a dialogue).

Human dialogs (conversations) are interactive. I think in the past computers were limited, and computer languages had to be very small (as compared with any human language + culture) so that a programmer could learn what the computer could do. But now that services can be connected (programming as a service?), would it make sense to have a dialogue? My example is that in the 1980s it wouldn't have made sense for any programming language to have a function called double() that just multiplies by 2. There's * 2 for that.

But in 2016, it makes sense for a beginner to write "and double it" and considerably less sense for a beginner to have to learn x *= 2 if they wanted to double a number.

Human language is also ambiguous. It would make sense for an interactive language to ask:

"Did you mean, set x equal to x multiplied by 2?" which most people would select, but maybe someone would select

"Did you mean, set x equal to the string "x" appended to the string "x"?"

For these reasons: do you think it would make sense to have an interactive programming language that is connected with a server you "talk" with interactively?

Or should programmers still have to learn a fixed programming language that has no room for interpretation, but instead a strict meaning.

Among other things, this means programmers can never write "it", "that", "which" to refer to a previous thing (since the referent could be ambiguous if the compiler doesn't confirm.) But every human language includes such shorthand.

I'd love to hear your thoughts regarding a connected, interactive programming process similar to the above (or just on whatever lines).

Of course, the 90's style is pretty hacker-hipster as well...can't deny that.

Whats the next step to improve remote working? Face to face still seems to be so superior for relationship building and problem solving despite the wealth of video conferencing, social and collaboration tools we have. I don't want to wear goggles...

thanks!

I'm curious if you've read much about Activity Theory. (in particular, Yrjö Engeström's Learning by Expanding.) I feel like it's compatible with much of what I've heard you discuss in lectures. Is it something you have an opinion on?

With containers and hypervisors now in desktop OSes (Windows, Mac OS, Linux), could an open-source research OS (e.g. KSWorld) be packaged for developers and end-users who want to test your team's experimental UIs?

Is there long-term value in "private machine learning" where some data and algos are focused on user/owner interests, with "public machine learning" providing variably-trusted signals to user-owned algos for intelligence augmentation?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8297996

One of the concepts I've heard you talk about before in interviews and the like is simulation. I think simulation is huge and we should be seeing products that cater towards it, but largely aren't.

http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=5

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/08/links-1214-come-ye-to-b...

Do you still think simulation is an important promise of the computer revolution, and are there any products you know of or ideas you have that are/would be a step in the right direction?

I feel like the current application paradigm cannot scale, and will only lead to further fragmentation. We all have 100+ different accounts, and 100+ different apps, none of which can interact with each other. Most people seem to think that AI will solve this, and make natural languages the main interface to AI, but I don't buy it. Speech seem so antiquated in comparison to what can be achieved through other senses (including sight and touch). How do you imagine humans will interact with future computer systems?

Or for another approach, how do you like HN?

1. what do you think about the hardware we are using as foundation of computing today? I remember you mentioning about how cool was the architecture of the Burroughs B5000 [1] being prepared to run on the metal the higher level programming languages. What do hardware vendors should do to make hardware that is more friendly to higher level programming? Would that help us to be less depending on VM's while still enjoying silicon kind of performance?

2. What software technologies do you feel we're missing?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems

In "The Power of the Context" (2004) you wrote:

  ...In programming there is a wide-spread 1st order
  theory that one shouldn’t build one’s own tools,
  languages, and especially operating systems. This is
  true—an incredible amount of time and energy has gone
  down these ratholes. On the 2nd hand, if you can build
  your own tools, languages and operating systems, then
  you absolutely should because the leverage that can be
  obtained (and often the time not wasted in trying to
  fix other people’s not quite right tools) can be
  incredible.

However, more often than not, I find the sentiment paralyzing. There's so much that one could probably learn to build themselves, but as things become more and more complex, one has to be able to make a rational tradeoff between spending the time and energy in the rathole, or not. I can't spend all day rebuilding everything I can simply because I can.

My question is: how does one decide when to DIY, and when to use what's already been built?

How do you feel about the role of computing technology in society today ? is it still important or should be work on other domains (education, medicine, ecology, and the industrial tissue that is our interface to reality nowadays).

While I'm at it, just did a MOOC about Pharo (~ex squeak) and ST was indeed a very interesting take on OO (if I may say so ;). So thanks for you and your teammates work along the years (from ST to STEPS).

Also, how do you organize and record your ideas? Pen and paper? Some kind of software? What system do you use? I ask because I'm fascinated by the idea of software that aids in thought, collaboration, and programming - meshing them all together.

I've seen elsewhere (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940007) that you agreed that many mainstream "paradigms" should be "retired". Retiring implies that you replace. In particular, I'm curious what you would like to see filesystems or the Unix terminal replaced with?

It's also related to what Scott Adams urges. It's pretty hard to get to be in the top best 10% at a single field. It's much easier to be in the top 25% of two different fields, which would make you one of the top 10% of that interdisciplinary combination.

I'm preparing a presentation on how to build a mental model of computing by learning different computer languages. It would be great to include some of your feedback.

* What programming language maps most closely to the way that you think?

* What concept would you reify into a popular language such that it would more closely fit that mapping?

* What one existing reified language feature do you find impacts the way you write code the most, especially even in languages where it is not available?

Engelbart's Augmenting Human Intellect [2] Edge's annual question, How is the Internet Changing the Way you Think? [3] Carr's Is Google Making Us Stupid? [4] ...and other common criticisms of "information overload"

[1] http://www.sabbathmanifesto.org/ [2] http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/augment-3906.html [3] https://www.edge.org/annual-question/how-is-the-internet-cha... [4] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl...

- Is there a project that is the continuation of the STEPS project?

- What is your opinion of the Elm language?

- How do you envision all the good research from the STEPS model could be used for building practical systems?

- STEPS focused on personal computing, do you have a vision on how something similar could be done for server-side programming?

- Where can I find all the source code for the Frank system and the DSLs described in the STEPS report?

Part of working your way back to reality can often require new hardware to be made or -- in the case of the days of microcode -- to shape the hardware.

There are lots of things vendors could do. For example: Intel could make its first level caches large enough to make real HLL emulators (and they could look at what else would help). Right now a plug-in or available FPGA could be of great use in many areas. From another direction, one could think of much better ways to organize memory architectures, especially for multi-core chips where they are quite starved.

And so on. We've gone very far down the road of "not very good" matchups, and of vendors getting programmers to make their CPUs useful rather than the exact opposite approach. This is too large a subject for today's AMA.

Who do you think are the people doing the most interesting work in user interface design today?

What do you think of the Pharo project?

Certainly, in this day and age, the lack of safe meta-definition is pretty much shocking.

That is, if I have a problem that requires a library or program, and I don't know of one, I semi-simultaneously try to find a library/program that exists out there (scanning forums, googling around, reading stack overflow, searching github, going to language repositories for the languages I care about, etc) and also in parallel try to formulate in my mind what the ideal solution would look like for my particular problem.

As time goes by, I get closer to finding a good enough library/program and closer to being able to picture what a solution would look like if I wrote it.

At some point I either find what I need (it's good enough or it's perfect) or I get to the point where I understand enough about the solution I'm envisioning that I write it up myself.

On the "worse is better" divide I've always considered you as someone standing near the "better" (MIT) approach, but with an understanding of the pragmatics inherent in the "worse is better" (New Jersey) approach too.

What is your actual position on the "worse is better" dichotomy?

Do you believe it is real, and if so, can there be a third alternative that combines elements from both sides?

And if not, are we always doomed (due to market forces, programming as "popular culture" etc) to have sub-par tools from what can be theoretically achieved?

We have to think about why this language is even worth mentioning today (partly I think by comparison ...)

Thanks!

Computers have been a part of education in the United States for several decades, but you've argued that technology isn't used to its full potential.

1. Why has technology in schools failed to make an impact?

2. How would you design a curriculum for your children that uses technology effectively today?

I think Google Glass should've been held back until VR/Augmented Reality gets established. Many Croquet style roving "viewports" projected from Google Glass feeds in an abstracted 3D model of a real world location would be a great way to do reporting on events.

Do you think they can act in a-la Newspeak(the 1984 Newspeak) way?

[0] https://youtu.be/N9c7_8Gp7gI?t=45m45s

Previously you've mentioned the "Oxbridge approach" to reading, whereby--if my recollection is correct--you take four topics and delve into them as much as possible. Could you elaborate on this approach (I've searched the internet, couldn't find anything)? And do you think this structured approach has more benefits than, say, a non-structured approach of reading whatever of interest?

Thanks for your time and generosity, Alan!

And what could be done to re-spark interest in moving forward?

My gut feeling says that it would require a complete overhaul in almost every layer in the stack we use today and that there's reluctance to do that. Would you agree to some degree with that?

What do you find most frustrating about software development at current times.

Regards, Jyoti

Development environments should help programmers think (but what if most programmers don't want to think?)

We need to find ways to free ourselves from the cage of "vendors getting programmers to make their CPUs useful rather than the exact opposite approach" <- meditate on this we all should

Edit: just noticed HARC and YC-Research. I'll check it out.

So what should a designer or a developer be doing now, to make things better in 10 years, or 100 years?

Some people claim you should still use the 3rd party solution because of the cost of supporting the extra code you have written. But bugs can exist in both my code and the 3rd party code and I understand how to fix bugs in my code much more easily.

PS:

I once ran into you in Westwood and you invited me to check out the CDG lab. Unfortunately I missed you when I came by. I'm always tempted to try again, but I'd hate to interrupt the serious thinking of the fellows stationed up there.

what do you think about interactive theorem proving (ITP)? Assuming that you are aware of it, is it something that you have tried? If yes, how was your experience, and which system did you try? If no, why not? What do you think about ITP's role in the grander scheme of things?

It really helped at Parc to work with real geniuses like Chuck Thacker and Dan Ingalls (and quite a few more). There is a very thin boundary between making the 2nd order work vs getting wiped out by the effort.

Another perspective on this is to think about "not getting caught by dependencies" -- what if there were really good independent module systems -- perhaps aided by hardware -- that allowed both worlds to work together (so one doesn't get buried under "useful patches", etc.)

One of my favorite things to watch at Parc was how well Dan Ingalls was able to bootstrap a new system out of an old one by really using what objects are good for, and especially where the new system was even much better at facilitating the next bootstrap.

I'm not a big Unix fan -- it was too late on the scene for the level of ideas that it had -- but if you take the cultural history it came from, there were several things they tried to do that were admirable -- including really having a tiny kernel and using Unix processes for all systems building (this was a very useful version of "OOP" -- you just couldn't have small objects because of the way processes were implemented). It was quite sad to see how this pretty nice mix and match approach gradually decayed into huge loads and dependencies. Part of this was that the rather good idea of parsing non-command messages in each process -- we used this in the first Smalltalk at Parc -- became much too ad hoc because there was not a strong attempt to intertwine a real language around the message structures (this very same thing happened with http -- just think of what this could have been if anyone had been noticing ...)

What do you think will be the impact of Cognitive Computing, and AI on the way software will be built in the next 5 years.

Do you think AI may automate fully some jobs, or part of the jobs people do today in IT & Software Development?

If so what do you think is the best approach professionals should take?

Thanks in advance for the answer, and thanks for doing this AMA.

Joseph

I've heard you frequently compare the OOP paradigm to microbiology and molecules. It seems like even Smalltalk-like object interactions are very different from, say, protein-protein interactions.

How do you think this current paradigm of message-sending could be improved upon to enable more powerful, perhaps protein-like composition?

He is certainly one of the most interesting and best thinkers of today.

You'll still be wrong, but perhaps less often.

I yearn to do great works of engineering and art, which I consider what you have done.

How do you come up with ideas?

The real question is "does a hack reset 'normal'?" For most people it tends to, and this makes it very difficult for them to think about the actual issues.

A quote I made up some years ago is "Better and Perfect are the enemies of What-Is-Actually-Needed". The big sin so many people commit in computing is not really paying attention to "What-Is-Actually-Needed"! And not going below that.

You've been a long-time proponent for creating educational software (e.g squeak etoys) helping teach kids how to program and have been fairly critical of the iPad in the past. What are your thoughts on Apple's new iPad Swift playground (http://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/) in teaching kids how to learn how to program in Swift?

Do you think UI aesthetics are important in software for kids?

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940227 and marked it off-topic.

I understand this is not the right place to discuss these matters, but I know it's highly likely that this message will be read here, I am happy to take this topic elsewhere.

2. What are your opinions on Worse Is Better (https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html)? It seems to me like you pursue the diamond-like jewel, but maybe that's not how you see it. (Just noticed you answered this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940276)

3. I've found the Situated Learning perspective interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning). At least I think about it when I feel grumpy about all the young kids and Node.js, and I genuinely like that they are excited about what they are doing, but it seems like they are on a mission to rediscover EVERYTHING, one technology and one long discussion at a time. But they are a community of learning, and maybe everyone (or every community) does have to do that if they are to apply creativity and take ownership over the next step. Is there a better way?

There's coming up with a good idea: learn how to not get buried in your ideas (most are mediocre down to bad even for people who have "good idea skills"!)

I write down ideas in notebooks to get rid of them. Every once in a while one will capture a different point of view.

And, there's the Princeton Tea joke of scientists comparing what they did for ideas. One says "I have them in the middle of the night so I have a pad by my bed". Another says "I have them in the shower so I have a grease pencil to write them on the walls". Einstein was listening and they asked him about his ideas. He said "I don't know, I've only had two!"

(Some people are better at filtering than others ...)

Does this ring a bell for you? I have searched for this article recently and not been able to find it again.

And then there is the issue that we need to make "systems" ...

I like what a function is, and this idea should be used, but I think it is better used rather differently ...

Copying from other sources. I'm not saying it's fake, just curious about verification as someone claimed so.

For instance, your "vouch", are you an official HN account. How can I tell?

[1] Everyone should really take a look at the Dynabook paper: http://history-computer.com/Library/Kay72.pdf

    * Graphical programming environment (they run the queries
      from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that)
    * Instant feedback - run the query get useful results
    * Compilation step with some type safety - will complain
      if their query is malformed
    * Are tables a "natural" way to think about data for humans?
    * Job relevance

What he said was important was to have a big horizon, at least 10 years. Anything less would not do.

Then envision what should be possible in that time. "It would be ridiculous if $X wasn't possible in $Y years" and then backtrack on what would technically be required to make that happen.

Rinse repeat. He said that with good company support and a good team, you often found yourself delivering at half that time none the less (but again, you should never constrain yourself to that little, or else you will stress towards performing, instead of thinking properly about the problems needing to be solved).

Alan: Hope I didn't butcher your message too much :)

[1] I think it might be this one, but I honestly haven't checked. See it anyway. It's a good talk. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs

A lot of the VPRI work involved inventing new languages (DSLs). The results were extremely impressive but there were some extremely impressive people inventing the languages. Do you think this is a practical approach for everyday programmers? You have also recommended before that there should be clear separation between meta model and model. Should there be something similar to discipline a codebase where people are inventing their own languages? Or should just e.g. OS writers invent the languages and everyone else use a lingua franca?

For example in Lisp, code is data and data is code (aka homoiconicity). This makes it very convenient to write macros (i.e. functions that accept and return executable code).

Unsafe meta-programming would be like the C pre-processor whose aptness for abuse make it a leading feature of IOCCC entries.

Did you have any ideas, predictions or visions which ultimately didn't play out? (And any ideas on why?)

Thank you very much to your contributions to our industry. Anyone blessed to be working in this field today owes you an enormous debt of gratitude. You have made a dent in the universe.

2. Let's do a dialog about this. Note that taking the process far enough starts resembling prayer to a deity and gives rise to many kinds of hedging. Math is completely expressible in ordinary language, but instead, the attempt to make it less ambiguous leads to conventions that have to be learned.

That said, have you thought about (say) objects needing to negotiate meaning with each other?

One of the most interesting processes -- especially in engineering -- is to make a model to find out what it is that you are trying to make. Sounds a little weird, but the model winds up being a great focuser of "attempts at intent".

Now let's contemplate just how bad most languages are at allowing model building and having optimizations being orthogonal rather than intertwined ...

This is really great, I've been thinking about that for years. Which Scott Adams said this, and where is it from?

The best tech founders often seem to have this quality. They're by no means top 10% in any individual category, but they're strong in technology and in some specific non-tech-related domain. In the right setting, dividing your attention between tech and a non-tech-related domain can actually make you more specialized in a way, not less.

I have this, entirely unprovable, theory that most founders of these types of "idea sets" are actually poly-ideological, i.e. giving weight to all possible ideas, and just happened to be exploring ideas which made the most sense at the time.

While I enjoy your thoughts on "object oriented", "functional", etc, I'd love to hear your thoughts about philosophy of religion and its origins (i.e. a slightly meta version of the conversation around "object oriented", "functional", etc). You may be one of a handful of humans able to provide me more data. Is this a topic that interests you, and is it something you think about? If it is something you think about, regarding the dogma you potentially accidentally helped instigate,

Did you and your peers intend for it to become dogma? The rest of my questions sorta assume you did not.

Retroactively, do you feel it was inevitable that these ideas, i.e. popular / powerful / effective ideas, which were espeically extremely effective at the time, became dogma for certain people, and potentially the community as a whole?

Either retroactively or at the time, did you ever identify moments when the dogma/re-definitions were forming/sticking? If so, did you ever want to intervene? Did you feel you were unable to?

Do you have any lessons learned about idea creation/popularization without allowing for re-definitions / accidentally causing their eventual turn into dogma?

Again, if this type of conversation doesn't interest you, or because it cloud potentially be delicate, you'd rather not have it in public, I'd understand.

Thanks regardless

1. Would you suggest going into a popular field that excites me but already has lot of brilliant students? (for example AI and ML)

Or rather into a not-so-popular field where maybe I can be of more help? (for example computational biology)

2. If I had to choose between studying my current favorite field at an average research group, or another still interesting field with a top group, would you suggest going with the latter for the overall learning experience?

I.e. it is really difficult (didn't happen) to guess the "self-evident" principles and operations that will allow you to deduce the universe. And being super-rational without science is one of the most dangerous things humans have come up with.

Also, what big UI changes do you foresee in the next 10 years - or would like to see. Thanks.

When you're working on a system, how do you approach the question, "Is this really useful, or am I spinning my wheels chasing a conceit?" Is the answer as simple as try it out and see what happens? Or do you have some sort of heuristic that your many years of experience has proven to be helpful?

What advice would you give to those who don't have a HARC to call their own? what would you do to get set up/a community/funding for your adventure if you were starting out today? What advice do you have for those who are currently in an industrial/academic institution who seek the true intellectual freedom you have found? Is it just luck?!

I enjoy watching your presentations, but I'm sure there are some I've missed.

That said, Bob Taylor cannot be praised too highly, both for Parc and for his earlier stint as one of the ARPA-IPTO directors.

Simple answer: There aren't a lot of Bob Taylors in any decade (but there are some). Big difference between then and now is that the funders were "just right" back then, and have been "quite clueless" over the last 30 some odd years. An interesting very recent exception is what Sam Altman is doing -- this is shaping into the biggest most interesting most important initiative since the 70s.

What research have you been a part of that is the most promising, yet least known, and why do you feel it failed to become more well known?

A rather kind big bear of a guy, with lots of ideas (and maybe a bit too much baggage from the past ...)

Worth reading all "the Macy people", including Gordon Pask, Heinz von Forester, etc.

I "secretly" think that Self would have achieved that too (and even better because is not constrained to the artificial abstraction of classes) but it never had a chance due to its unsuccessful IDE.

Our cognitive system converges too much to objectify things to ignore. We compulsively do that. There is something about objects that fits our cognitive system better. It's a waste if we don't take full advantage of it.

What is your preferred technology stack?

Biggest thanks for helping create the modern computer and its peripherals and helping advocate programming for children! Computers is the base which I enjoy the most as a hobby and make my living off.

What is your vision for the future of computing?

Should we currently be interested in quadrillions, upper trillions, or, perhaps, larger? Once we become interested in an appropriately large number, what preparations should we be taking so that we can operate at that level? Do we just start putting product out there and collect the value on the open markets, or, do we need to segment markets to maximize value? Can you tell us about any other mistakes you feel Xerox might have made in realizing the value of PARC?

The biggest problems are that the "enterprisers" very often have no sense that they are living in a system that has many ecological properties and needs to be "tended and gardened".

Not an easy problem because we are genetically hunters and gatherers, we had to invent most of the actual sources of wealth, and these inventions were not done by the most typical human types.

Yet another thing where education with a big "E" should really make a difference (today American education itself has pretty much forgotten the "citizenship" part, which is all about systems and tending them.

Something that I find striking about you and your work is your cross discipline approach to hardware, software, and "humanware".

Can you speak about people and subjects which have inspired you from fields other than computer science and how they have changed you as a person and technologist.

The Dilbert guy. It's from: https://amzn.com/1591847745

One example could be, give me money and I'll give you a computer that can translate English to Spanish.

Another example could be, Apple share holders profit from iphone sales, and the iphone UI leads naive/normal people to think texting while driving is ok.

Could you please answer:

1) What is your opinion about Actor Model? Does it have a potential? What is the next step for OOP?

2) Do you think software of the future should be end-user modifiable?

3) What would be the Dynabook of 2016? Smart contact lenses with a gesture interface?

Thank you very much!

You have an interesting reading list at http://www.squeakland.org/resources/books/readingList.jsp. However it seems that it was created long time back. Are there any other books that you would like to add to this list ?

The VPRI reports, and before that some of the papers on Croquet (especially the idea of "teatime" which might be described as event-driven, log-based, relative time with eventual data/world-consistency) are fascinating, and I'm grateful for them being published. Also the Ometa-stuff[o] is fascinating (if anything, I think it's gotten too little mind-share).

It seems to me, that we've evolved a bit, in the sense that some things that used to be considered programming (display a text string on screen), no longer is (type it into notepad.exe) -- it's considered "using a computer". At the same time some things that were considered somewhat esoteric is becoming mainstream: perhaps most importantly the growing (resurging?) trend that programming really is meta-programming and language creation.

ReactJS is a mainstream programming model, that fuses html, css, javascript and a at least one templating language - and in a similar vein we see a great adoption in "transpiled" languages, such as coffee script, typescript, clojurescript and more. HN runs on top of Ark, which is a lisp that's been bent hard in the direction of http/html. I see this as a bit of an evolution from when the most common DSLs people were writing for themselves were ORMs - mapping some host language to SQL.

In your time with VPRI - did you find other new patterns or principles for meta-programming and (micro) language design that you think could/should be put to use right now?

Other than the web-developers tendency to reinvent m4 at every turn, in order to program html, css and js at a "higher" level, and the before-mentioned ORM-trends -- the only somewhat mainstream system I am aware of that has a good toolkit for building "real" DSLs, is Racket Scheme (Which shows if one contrasts something like Sphinx, which is a fine system, with Racket's scribble[2]).

Do you think we'll continue to see a rise of meta-programming and language design as more and more tools become available, and it becomes more and more natural to do "real" parsing rather than ad-hoc munging of plain text?

[o] https://github.com/alexwarth/ometa-js

[s] https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4017

You have inspired me deeply, thank you. I love working with man's greatest invention, but I have a deep sense of dread. HN is very good about projecting a fantasy about the future, that technology can solve all problems. I would love to see a world where people use computers to compute. However, global warming is a real threat and my biggest fear is that our pop-culture will prevent us from solving our problems before the chance to solve them is taken away from us.

With such a huge threat to humanity on the horizon, do you maintain a sense of optimism here? Or will humanity forget how to "compute" the same way Europeans forgot how to make Roman concrete?

Part of the deal is being really stubborn about what you want to do -- for example, I've never tried to make money from my ideas (because then you are in a very different kind of process -- and this process is not at all good for the kinds of things I try to do).

Every once in a while one runs into "large minded people" like Sam Altman and Vishal Sikka, who do have access to funding that is unfettered enough to lead to really new ideas.

I'm part of a generation who didn't grew up with the PDP but had LOGO and basic available in computers and calculators. With the Amstrad CPC it was possible to interupt a program and to change a few lines of code to make it do something else which was a great way to keep interested. And with calculator it was possible to code formulas to resolve/check problems.

But how would you teach programming today to a kid? Would you choose a particular medium such as a computer, a raspberry pi or even a tablet?

And if I may, do you recommend any reading for bedtime stories?

Thanks you, Kevin

I'm curious whether you think it might be an important/interesting direction for program editors to depart from character sequence manipulation to something along the lines of AST editors. Or is this only a red herring, and perhaps not so deep a change?

Visual Studio has let you do hot code editing for over a decade now, they call it "Edit and Continue"[0]. Only works for some languages (C#, Visual Basic/C++). It also lets you modify the program state while stopped on a break-point with code of your devising.

Most browsers also let you adhoc compose and run code without modifying the underlying programs.

Thanks to hardware performance counters, profilers are now able to profile code with much less impact on performance (eg: no more adjusting timeouts due to profiler overhead). Network debuggers are getting better at decoding traffic and displaying it in a more human readable format (eg: automatic gzip decompression, stream reassembly, etc).

[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bcew296c.aspx

Note: He mentions being inspired for that from discussions with you at Atari.

So I think we have to put something more than randomness and following links to use here. (You can spend a lot of time learning about a big system like Linux without hitting many of the most important ideas in computing -- so we have to heed the "Art is long and Life is short" idea.

Part of the "Oxbridge" process is to have a "reader" (a person who helps you choose what to look at), and these people are worth their weight in gold ...

Do you have any advice about community building, especially around fostering new and big ideas?

We know you are not a big fan of web. Regardless how we got here, what is your view on how we should address the real world decentralization problems in the context of http://www.decentralizedweb.net/ ?

(Note that "assignment" to a variable is "meta" in a functional language (and you might want to use a "roll back 'worlds' mechanism" (like transactions) for safety when this is needed.)

This is a parallel to various kinds of optimization (many of which violate module boundaries in some way) -- there are ways to make this a lot safer (most languages don't help much)

    for user in table_users:
        if user.is_active:
            return user.first_name;

    SELECT first_name FROM users_table
    WHERE is_active

I came up with an idea that seems a bit like the Dynabook. It helps the user to understand design decisions. Here's a short video about it (under 2 mins):

https://www.vimeo.com/24332798

In this case it's about how to build a digger.

I'd love to know what you think about it.

What skills would your (hypothetical?) apprentice need to have?

If this were more like a partnership what would be the subject to work on?

For that matter, what are you working on now?

The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...

Any advice on how to do that, especially for those of us who are completely non-visual thinkers (aphantasia)?

A feature like this may help your programmers who are used to thinking in terms of filter -> select -> order.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb397927.aspx

Just after college, I took my first airplane trip, destination California, in search of a job. I was seated next to a businessman who was probably in his early 60s. I suppose I looked like an odd duck with my serious demeanor, bad haircut and cheap suit, clearly out of my element. I asked what he did for a living, and he told me he was the CEO of a company that made screws. He offered me some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. For him, job seeking was not something one did when necessary. It was a continuing process.

This makes perfect sense if you do the math. Chances are that the best job for you won't become available at precisely the time you declare yourself ready. Your best bet, he explained, was to always be looking for a better deal. The better deal has its own schedule. I believe the way he explained it is that your job is not your job; your job is to find a better job.

This was my first exposure to the idea that one should have a system instead of a goal. The system was to continually look for better options.

A better issue is not getting sucked into "legal drugs" that have no nutritional value.

"We are already stupid" -- this is why things could be much much better but aren't. We have to start with ourselves, and a positive way to do this is to ask "what can real education really do to help humanity?"

Many of the same things can happen in sandbox style games. I think there is a tremendous potential for learning in such abstracted environments. What about something like Minecraft, but with abstracted molecules instead of blocks? Problems, like the ones around portraying how molecules inside a cell are constantly jostling against water molecules, could be solved in such environments using design. Many people who play well balanced games at a high level often seem to be learning something about strategy and tactics in particular rule systems. I suspect that there is something educationally valuable in a carefully chosen and implemented rule system.

Also perhaps, it's so much easier to exploit such mechanisms to merely addict people, that overwhelms any value to be gained.

I see so many dev resources burnt just because people build boring UIs or persistence bindings by wiring MANUALLY in traditional languages. All this is a no-brainer when enough meta infos (objects and relations) are available and a program is reflected as data as in Smalltalk (not dead text). You can not only transform data but also your code. Pharo now makes some more additonal steps to enhance reflection (metalinks, slots, etc).

What do you see as next steps in using metadata/-infos for (meta)programming ...

Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds of caching Kahneman's "System 1" does for us for real-time performance and in lieu of actual thinking.

On the surface it's a structured editor for a type safe language in which it's impossible to write an invalid program, but the author has some pretty lofty goals for it.

[1] http://unisonweb.org/2015-05-07/about.html

Thank you, Alan!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10957020

I think, usable day-to-day, I'd say you're down to Haiku, MorphOS, Genode, MINIX 3, and/or A2 Bluebottle. Haiku is a BeOS clone. MorphOS is one of last Amiga's that looks pretty awesome. Genode OS is a security-oriented, microkernel architecture that's using UNIX for bootstrapping but doesn't inherently need it. MINIX 3 similarly bootstrapping on NetBSD but adds microkernels, user-mode drivers, and self-healing functions. A2 Bluebottle is most featured version of Oberon OS in safe, GC'd language. Runs fast.

The usability of these and third party software available vary considerably. One recommendation I have across the board is to back up your data with a boot disc onto external media. Do that often. Reason being, any project with few developers + few users + bare metal is going to have issues to resolve that long-term projects will have already knocked out.

1. It is known that you read a lot. Do you plan to write a book? You have been a big inspiration for me and I would love to read a book from you.

2. What is your opinion about Self programming language (http://www.selflanguage.org)? I've read „STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming“ pdf and this feels related, especially to with the Klein interpreter (http://kleinvm.sourceforge.net/).

I'm a CS PhD student at Caltech. What advice do you have for young computer scientists, especially for PhD students?

Debates should have a programming language, have CI for new arguments, have unit tests to check logic, have issues tracked and collaborated on GitHub.

Okay! I'm up for a dialog with Alan Kay if Alan Kay is up for a dialog with me :)

>gives rise to many kinds of hedging.

100% agreed. I have a great example of hedging. Human languages are usually quite ambiguous. But there's an exception: when there is a legal document, then if it gets to court the other party can take any ambiguity and turn it around. (For example argue that an "it" refers to other than the closest possible referent.) As a result, legal documents are very unambiguous. This makes them very, very explicit. Implicit contexts, and human culture, are difficult - they get lost with time. If you've ever read Shakespeare's dialogues, they're hard to understand without heavy glossing just 400 years later. But we actually have a copy of Shakespeare's will. Here it is: http://www.cummingsstudyguides.net/xWill.html

Without a single gloss or footnote and without modernizing the spelling (as we do for plays) you can understand nearly 100.00% of it 400 years later. Without even modernized spelling, you could likely turn it into "code" (it's very similar to code) with complete unambiguity.

But the actual "conversation" that led to that, in the room where Shakespeare was talking with the lawyer, if we had a transcript, would be likely impenetrable to us without careful reading and maybe footnotes -- just like the dialogue of Shakespeare's plays. Imagine calling up your lawyer and leaving a voicemail describing what you want in some document. That might lead to a brief dialog and then a draft for your approval. That dialog would be hard to understand, possibly even for an outsider today.

So the question is: is there room for an 'agent' (service) that builds up a shared context with someone interacting with it, then produces something for outside consumption? That might mean that the user can say "it" or "unless" but the service turns "it" into a referent (and makes sure it got the right want) and turns unless into "; if ( not ) { }" for outsiders. I say this because this is only one interpretation of "unless". Another interpretation is that an exception might happen that you want to address and then not continue...

>Math is completely expressible in ordinary language, but instead, the attempt to make it less ambiguous leads to conventions that have to be learned.

This is very true and extremely interesting. When people rearrange an equation in symbolic form (crossing out common factors, etc), they do so doing complex symbol processing that isn't linguistic in nature. I think it's a different tangent from the one I'm asking about - after all, would it be common for anyone to write "The limit of the function f of x, as x tends to 0" instead of the common lim notation?

So the line of thinking with symbolism is extremely powerful, and after all isn't that why we have whiteboards that don't have neat lines on them for you to write sentences into? Diagrams / symbols / pictures are all very powerful and aspects of thinking. This part is tangential to what I was thinking of.

It would be interesting, though, if the interactive process could produce a diagram for you to rearrange if you wanted. I don't know if you know electrical engineering (probably!) but magine being able to ask an interactive service "I'd like a simple circuit that lights a led from a battery", and you get one -- as well as some questions about whether you really didn't need any fuses in it? what sized batteries you were talking about? that it's a DC circuit right? And so forth. It's a separate question whether you could rearrange the results.

Of course, if you are allowed to say something like "I'd like a circuit around an ARM processor where all the components cost under $30 in quantity under 1000 including pcb setup costs". That's like praying to a diety!

Is there room for some level of interaction between "double x" and praying?

Wolfram Alpha certainly suggests there is. Although it doesn't ask you anything back / isn't interactive, I've certainly been shocked at some of the things it was able to interpret.

For example, I could ask it how far sound travels in 10 ms, so that I could judge what large of a perceived physical offset effect introducing 10 ms of latency would cause. Well, I just tried it again so I could link to you, and it didn't get "how far does sound travel in 10 ms", it didn't get "distance sound travels in 10 ms", but on my third try "speed of sound in air * 10 ms" it got me the answer - its interpretation was:[1]

>speed of sound in dry air at 20 °C and 1 atmosphere pressure×10 ms (milliseconds)

and it gave me 3.432 meters.

What is interesting is that there was nothing interactive in this process, just me guessing until it got what I meant. It didn't ask me anything back. For me, the three phrases I just quoted are equal. For Wolfram Alpha, it misinterpreted the first two quite badly, and got the third one easily.

So the question is - could such a process be applied to programming? Could the user try to write "lowest common factor of a and b" have the compiler completely miss, try "least common factor of a and b", have the compiler completely miss, try "least common multiple of a and b" and finally have the compiler get it? Because that's not how programming works today. At all. (Well, in actual practice it kind of is thanks to Google - but it's not what goes on in the IDE.)

So it would be interesting to know if some progress could be made along these lines.

>have you thought about (say) objects needing to negotiate meaning with each other?

No, it's a tough one. For simplicity, I thought of the current output being boilerplate code (like existing C/C++ code), so that the headache you just mentioned doesn't need to be thought about :-D

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=speed+of+sound+in+air+*...

Maybe also easier to match to hardware than LISP or FP DSL's along lines of Haskell. I'm a little out of my depth there, though. I just remember LISP machine and OS crowd having to innovate hard to fight performance issues. PreScheme & T being exceptions where low-level was easy.

The main thing a language shouldn't have is "gratuitous difficulties" (or stupidities).

That said, it's worth thinking about the problems of introducing things in our culture today that even have the learning curves of bicycles, let alone airplanes ...

Or ... what is the place of tensor calculus in a real physical science?

What is the best interface for computer programming? I have settled on the keyboard with an emacs interpreter for now, but I'm curious if you believe voice, gestures, mouse or touch are or will be better ways of conveying information?

I have read a lot about you and your work at Xerox.

Do you enjoy travel? What continents have you been to? What's your favorite country outside the US?

How many hours a day did you sleep per day during your most productive research years? Cos i usually wonder how very productive people seem to achieve much more than others within the same 24 hours we all have.

Greetings form Lagos Nigeria.

http://2015.padjo.org/tutorials/sql-walks/exploring-wsj-medi...

My main reason for teaching it was that it was a skill that helped me immensely as a journalist, in terms of being able to do data analysis. Because I learned it relatively late in my career, I thought it'd be hard for the students but most of them are able to get it.

Even though I use relatively little SQL in my day to day work, it's my favorite thing to teach to novices. First, it has a similar data model to spreadsheets, so it feels like a natural progression. Secondly, for many students, this is the first time that they'll have done "real" programming and the first time that they learn how to tell a computer to do something rather than learn how to use a computer. In Excel, for example, you double click a file and the entire thing opens. With SQL, you're required to not just specify the database and table, but also each and every column...it's annoying at first, but then you realize that there is power in being explicit.

The main advantage of teaching SQL over, say R, as a first language is that SQL's declarative syntax is easy to follow AND you can do most of what you need with a limited subset of the language...for instance, I don't have to teach variables and loops and functions...which is good because I don't even know how to really do those in SQL (just haven't had the need when I can work from R or Pandas).

When a beginner student fucks up a basic Python script, there are any number of reasons for the failure that is beyond the student's expected knowledge. When a novice student fucks up a SQL query...it's easier to blame the mistake on the student (e.g. Misspelling of names/syntax)

What do you think about EAST paradigm which tries to revamp the original spirit of OOP you stated ?

Do you think that the machine learning community suffer from the syndrome of "normal considered harmful". Like using vendor hardware instance of designing their own (FPGA for instance)

Type-safe metaprogramming Sheard

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=E63...

Type-safe, reflective metaprogramming Microsoft

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/dl.aspx?id=103561

Rascal - Metaprogramming language and platform

http://www.rascal-mpl.org/

So, given work like that, what remaining tough problems are there before you would find a metaprogramming system safe and acceptable? Or do we have the fundemantals available but you just don't like the lack of deployment in mainstream or pragmatic languages and IDE's?

Note: Just dawned on me that you might mean abstract programming in the sense of specifying, analyzing, and coding up abstract requirements closer to human language. Still interested in what gripes or goals you have on that end if so.

1. Do you think the area of HCI is stagnating today?

2. What are your thoughts on programming languages that encapsulate Machine Learning within language constructs and/or generally take the recent advancements in NLP and AI and integrate them as a way to augment the programmer?

Q: I've always been a big fan both of text console accessible UI's like CLI's and REPL's as well as of GUI's. In my mind they each clearly have a different mix of strengths and weaknesses. One way a user might have a bit of the "best of both worlds" potentially is an app or client featuring a hybrid input design where all 3 of these modes are available for the user to drive. Any thoughts on that?

I'm writing a paper in my free time about some architectural ideas in this area and would love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to tell me this is a FAQ and that I should go read a particular book/paper of yours, and/or to get off your lawn. :-)

thank you!

We met at a retreat last fall, and it was a real treat for me to hear some fantastic stories/anecdotes about the last 50 years of computing (which I have only been directly involved with for about 1/10th of). Another one of my computing heroes is Seymour Cray, which we talked about a bit and your time at Chippewa Falls. While a lot of HN'ers know about you talking about the Burroughs B5000, I (and I bet most others) would have had no idea that you got to work with Seymour on the CDC 6600. DO you have any particular Seymour Cray/6600 stories that you think would be of interest to the crowd?

Thanks again for doing this, and I hope to be able to talk again soon!

So, given I don't study it or read on it, I'm actually curious if you or anyone else has references on where information theory impacts real software development over the years. I study lots of formal methods & synthesis research but never even see the phrase mentioned. I've been imagining it's in its own little field working at a strongly theoretical level making abstract or concrete observations about computers. Just don't see them outside some cryptography stuff I've read.

EDIT to add example below where Bertrand Meyer presents a Theory of Programs that ties it all to basic, set theory.

https://bertrandmeyer.com/2015/07/06/new-paper-theory-of-pro...

As a high school teacher, I often find that discussions of technology in education diminish 'education' to curricular and assessment documentation and planning; however, these artifacts are only a small element of what is, fundamentally, a social process of discussion and progressive knowledge building.

If the real work and progress with my students comes from our intellectual both-and-forth (rather than static documentation of pre-exhibiting knowledge), are there tools I can look to that have been/will be created to empower and enrich this kind of in situ interaction?

Many of the "current best paradigms" of Computer Science are actually fads. LISP was a fad of the 1980s. Java was a fad of the 1990s. NoSQL databases are a current fad. It doesn't mean that one is better than another. It's human nature to think that new technology must be better than old technology. In fact, the programming environment on the LISP machines of the 1980s was far better than anything we had till the early 2000s, despite being "old".

1. focus on data processing rather than imperative way of thinking (esp. functional programming)

2. abstraction over parallelism and distributed systems

3. interactive collaboration between developers

4. development accessible to a much broader audience, especially to domain experts, without sacrificing power users

In fact the startup I'm working in aims exactly in this direction. We have created a purely functional visual<->textual language Luna ( http://www.luna-lang.org ).

By visual<->textual I mean that you can always switch between code, graph and vice versa.

What do you think about these assumptions?

Most things around here are not how they should seem.

What to do about System 1, though? Truly interactive research/communication documents, as described by Bret Victor, should be a great help, to my mind, but what do you think could be beyond that?

Tabs or spaces?

Let me just say that it's worth trying to understand what might be a "really good" balance between traditional oral culture learning and thinking, what literacy brings to the party, especially via mass media, and what the computer and pervasive networking should bring as real positive additions.

One way to assess what is going on now is partly a retreat from real literacy back to oral modes of communication and oral modes of thought (i.e. "texting" is really a transliteration of an oral utterance, not a literary form).

This is a disaster.

However, even autodidacts really need some oral discussions, and this is one reason to have a "school experience".

The question is balance. Fluent readers can read many times faster than oral transmissions, and there are many more resources at hand. This means in the 21st century that most people should be doing a lot of reading -- especially students (much much more reading than talking). Responsible adults, especially teachers and parents, should be making all out efforts to help this to happen.

For the last point, I'd recommend perusing Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", and this will be a good basis for thinking about tradeoffs between actual interactions (whether with people or computers) and "pondering".

I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs....

I'm old, very hard to stay on top of all the changes.

I would love to hear your thoughts on how to "train" "System 1", in order to make "System 2" more powerful. Not necessarily here, due to the time factor, but if you find some time to think more deeply on this, please let me know and we can think through this together.

I don't know what the solution is. Perhaps a language with a fundamentally different view of objects, maybe as an ancestry of deltas of state/behavior pairings, somewhat like prototypes but inheriting by versioning and incrementally changing so that state and behavior always match up but still allowing you to revert to a working version. Likely Alan has some better ideas on what sort of language we need.

(We are fortunate that most of what is "new" is more like "particular 'news'" rather than actually "new". From the standpoint of actual categorical change, things have been very slow the last 30 years or so.)

The hard part is knowing what we mean - really knowing, not just thinking that we know.

I find the whole project (politics aside, though i wish this caveat was unnecessary) stunningly beautiful, especially the focus on verbalization (#spokenDSL), and having Alan Kay be interested in it is flattering even though I have no relation whatsoever :)

The second question requires too long an answer for this forum.

But strangely, it seems like companies are still treating those all as separate lines. For example, Apple markets their home and watch projects totally independently of one another. But I have to think that they are working toward ubiquitous computing, much as they worked toward the Dynabook over the decades.

A few devices issuing orders, and a bunch of dumb devices taking orders.

It crossed over with some of my experience of programming. Recently he wrote "The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time" with Roberto Unger, but I haven't read that yet.

Which less?

Is there any specific cognitive, childhood, intellectual, educational, etc., development model that this is based on?

How would you account and adapt for different proclivities and/or interests?

The "Chippewa OS" is too big a story for here, but it turned out that the official Control Data software team failed to come up with any software for the 6600! Hence a bunch of us from Livermore, Los Alamos, NCAR, etc. -- the places that had bought the machine -- were assembled in Chippewa Falls to "do something".

Perhaps the most interesting piece of unofficial software was a multitasking OS with graphical debugger for the 6600 that had been written by Seymour Cray -- to help debug the machine -- in octal absolute! I had the honor of writing a de-assembler for this system so we ordinary mortals could make changes and add to it (this was an amazing tour de force given the parallel architecture and multiple processes for this machine). And it was also a good object lesson for what Cray was really good at, and what he was not so good at (there were some really great decisions on this machine, and some really poor ones -- both sets quite extreme)

This is the meta-thing that’s been bugging me: how do we help people realize they’re “missing their actual potential as thinkers”?

The world seems so content to be an oral culture again, how do we convince / change / equip people to be skeptical of these media?

Joe Edelman’s Centre for Livable Media (http://livable.media) seems like a step in the right direction. How else can we convince people?

I've been particularly interested lately in the works of the late John Holland, W. Brian Arthur (of PARC & Stanford), J. Doyne Farmer, Kevin Kelley, David Krakauer, and others (many of these are affiliated with the Santa Fe Institute).

In particular, they speak to modularity, technology as an evolutionary process, and other concepts which strike me being solidly reflected in software development as well. Steve McConnell's Code Complete, for example, first really hammered home to me the concept of modularity in design.

You've been involved in visual programming environments like GRAIL and Etoys for kids. What do you think of the current state of visual programming for both kids and adults?

One way to look at this is that the most important learning anyone can do is to understand "Human beings as if from Mars" -- meaning to get beyond our fooling ourselves and to start trying to deal with what is dangerous and counterproductive in our genetic (and hence cultural) makeups. This is quite different than what most schools think they are supposed to be about -- but the great Jerome Bruner in the 60s came up with a terrific curriculum for 5th graders that was an excellent start for "real anthroplogy" in K-5.