←back to thread

Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 1 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).
Show context
tmerr ◴[21 Jun 16 07:39 UTC] No.11944098[source]▶
Hi Alan,

I watched an OOPSLA talk where you described how tapes were used when you were in the air force. The tape readers were simple because they stupidly followed instructions on the tapes themselves to access the data. You seemed to like this arrangement better than what we have with web browsers and html, where the browser is assumed to know everything about the format. One way to interpret this is that we should have something more minimal like a bytecode format for the web, in place of html.

So I'm interested on your take: Is WebAssembly a step in the right direction for the web? (Although it's not meant as a replacement for html, maybe it will displace it over time).

replies(1): >>11945715 #
1. alankay1 ◴[21 Jun 16 14:13 UTC] No.11945715[source]▶
This is a perfect example of "systems blindness" in the face of real scaling.

What should a browser actually know in order to scale (and why didn't the browser folks realize this? (rhetorical question) -- this knowledge was already well around by the early 90s).