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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 4 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.64s | 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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panic ◴[20 Jun 16 22:48 UTC] No.11942213[source]▶
Hi Alan,

There's a lot of economic pressure against building new systems. Making new hardware and software takes longer than building on the existing stuff. As time goes on, it gets harder and harder to match the features of the existing systems (imagine the effort involved in reimplementing a web browser from scratch in a new system, for example), not to mention the massive cost benefits of manufacturing hardware at a large scale.

Many people working in software realize the systems they use are broken, but the economics discourage people from trying to fix them. Is it possible to fix the economics? Or maybe we need more people able to resist this pressure?

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alankay1 ◴[21 Jun 16 13:51 UTC] No.11945559[source]▶
One start to this is not to do "a web browser" -- or other software -- with such bad initial conceptions (see elsewhere above). There was nothing necessary about this.

We have a technology in which hacks are easy and can be really easily multiplied by the billions and sent everywhere. If we translate this into the world of medicine and disease and sanitation, what should we do? How far should we go?

(But it is still really hard for me to understand the nature and force of the resistance to "real objects" -- which -- as actual virtual encapsulated machines -- were invented to deal with scaling and replacement to parallel the same kinds of thinking we did for the Internet with physical objects (called "computers")

Yikes!

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1. panic ◴[21 Jun 16 13:56 UTC] No.11945595[source]▶
I guess I'm thinking about this from the perspective of someone trying to make a computer for the general public. How will you convince anyone to buy and use a computer that can't browse the web?

(And I doubt this is a problem that will go away with time; the web is big enough that it seems unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon.)

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2. alankay1 ◴[21 Jun 16 15:42 UTC] No.11946517[source]▶
Yes, but what should the web actually be? And how can it be gotten there, etc.
3. nickpsecurity ◴[21 Jun 16 17:13 UTC] No.11947379[source]▶
Several companies making game consoles have done it repeatedly. Phone companies do it. People were actually buying dedicated, word processors for a while despite existence of MS Word & Internet. There's devices that only let you read books. There was one, popular computer that could only play about 5GB of music.

Seeing the patterns connecting them all? That it will be a niche market to begin with doesn't mean there's no market or it's not worthwhile.

Here's one for you given success of gaming and entertainment products: a all-in-one computer combining rapid iteration, memory safety, efficiency, and HW acceleration for common things (esp graphics); a Python or BASIC (eg DarkBASIC) designed for gaming w/ libraries for common features; a port of a game creator program plus examples & artwork to draw on; tutorials a la Realm of Racket or Land of LISP that teach you the language with successive building of game modules with increasing complexity or knowledge required; ability to live patch & debug a la LISP the games with failure isolation so no lost work or long times between runs.

Think people would buy it? Especially people new to programming who would find C++, Java, web stacks, and so on daunting with low-reward steps in the learning process? Could such a HW/SW combination be a 180 for them in motivation and learning?

4. mmiller ◴[21 Jun 16 17:50 UTC] No.11947763[source]▶
To provide a little hope, I think it should be pointed out that the Frank project (VPRI) achieved web browsing that is compatible with the existing web protocol, using real objects. What it allowed is an extension of browsing on the web. So, it's not as if the two (good architecture and bad architecture) can't both exist in the same space, and be used at the same time. I think the key to answering your question is asking will people in the general public find the impetus to understand the limited nature of bad architecture, and (on one possible track) either use the good architecture to make the experience better, or (on another possible track) come up with a better computing/content architecture that does away with the web as we know it altogether?