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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 1 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.282s | source

This request originated via recent discussions on HN, and the forming of HARC! at YC Research. I'll be around for most of the day today (though the early evening).
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CharlesMerriam2 ◴[20 Jun 16 18:19 UTC] No.11939986[source]▶
Many mainstream programming tools feel to be moving backwards. For example, Saber-C of the 1980s allowed hot-editing without restarting processes and graphical data structures. Similarly, the ability to experiment with collections of code before assembling them into a function was advance.

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

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1. alankay1 ◴[20 Jun 16 18:52 UTC] No.11940314[source]▶
You could "hot-edit" Lisp (1.85 at BBN) in the 60s (and there were other such systems). Smalltalk at Parc in the 70s used many of these ideas, and went even further.

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