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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 3 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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psibi ◴[20 Jun 16 18:25 UTC] No.11940049[source]▶
What do you think about functional languages like Haskell, OCaml etc ?
replies(1): >>11940599 #
alankay1 ◴[20 Jun 16 19:22 UTC] No.11940599[source]▶
They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents).

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 ...

replies(4): >>11941816 #>>11941907 #>>11942445 #>>11951555 #
1. bbcbasic ◴[20 Jun 16 23:31 UTC] No.11942445[source]▶
> They need a much better idea of time (such as approaches to McCarthy's fluents).

I am not sure what the time problem is for functional programming, but I reckon the Elm language/framework solves problems with time in a very elegant way with it's flavour of FRP and Signals.

In Elm, you can play back your UI interactions in a debugger as they happened and watch the variables as they would have been!

replies(1): >>11942494 #
2. alankay1 ◴[20 Jun 16 23:41 UTC] No.11942494[source]▶
Worth looking at Bob Balzer's EXDAMS system at Rand in the late 60s early 70s.
replies(1): >>11947470 #
3. nickpsecurity ◴[21 Jun 16 17:22 UTC] No.11947470[source]▶
Google search gives a lot of gibberish on those terms. Here's the paper for anyone trying to follow-up on that comment:

https://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1969/5073/00...