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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 2 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.508s | 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).
1. mythz ◴[20 Jun 16 19:26 UTC] No.11940639[source]▶
Do you still code today? If so what's your preferred language, editor, OS?
replies(1): >>11953910 #
2. alankay1 ◴[22 Jun 16 13:57 UTC] No.11953910[source]▶
When I write code it is usually either "kiddicode" for future "kiddilanguages" or "metacode" (for future languages ".")

I did have a lot of fun last year writing code in a resurrected version of the Notetaker Smalltalk-78 (done mostly by Dan Ingalls and Bert Freudenberg from a rescued disk pack that Xerox had thrown away) to create a visual presentation for a tribute to Ted Nelson on his 70th birthday: https://youtu.be/AnrlSqtpOkw?t=135

This particular system was a wonderful sweet spot for those days -- it was hugely expressive and quite small and understandable (my size). (This was the Smalltalk system that Steve Jobs saw the next year in 1979 -- though with fewer pictures because of memory limitations back then).