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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: 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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16bytes ◴[20 Jun 16 18:40 UTC] No.11940211[source]▶
Hi Alan,

I'm preparing a presentation on how to build a mental model of computing by learning different computer languages. It would be great to include some of your feedback.

* What programming language maps most closely to the way that you think?

* What concept would you reify into a popular language such that it would more closely fit that mapping?

* What one existing reified language feature do you find impacts the way you write code the most, especially even in languages where it is not available?

replies(1): >>11940252 #
alankay1 ◴[20 Jun 16 18:44 UTC] No.11940252[source]▶
I think I'd ask "What programming language design would help us think a lot better than we do now (we are currently terrible!)

Certainly, in this day and age, the lack of safe meta-definition is pretty much shocking.

replies(2): >>11940453 #>>11941568 #
dang ◴[20 Jun 16 19:06 UTC] No.11940453[source]▶
Could you give an example of what you mean by "safe meta-definition"? I'd like to understand this better.
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alankay1 ◴[20 Jun 16 20:13 UTC] No.11941131{3}[source]▶
"Meta is dangerous" so a safe meta-language within a language will have "fences" to protect.

(Note that "assignment" to a variable is "meta" in a functional language (and you might want to use a "roll back 'worlds' mechanism" (like transactions) for safety when this is needed.)

This is a parallel to various kinds of optimization (many of which violate module boundaries in some way) -- there are ways to make this a lot safer (most languages don't help much)

replies(1): >>11941531 #
edejong ◴[20 Jun 16 21:00 UTC] No.11941531{4}[source]▶
I've always felt that the meta space is too exponential or hyper to mentally represent or communicate. Perhaps we need different lenses to project the effects of the meta space on our mental model. Do you think this is why Gregor decided to move towards aspects?
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alankay1 ◴[20 Jun 16 21:09 UTC] No.11941609{5}[source]▶
I don't think Aspects is nearly as good an idea as MOP was. But the "hyperness" of it is why the language and the development system have to be much better. E.g. Dan Ingalls put a lot of work into the Smalltalks to allow them to safely be used in their own debugging, even very deep mechanisms. Even as he was making these breakthroughs back then, we were all aware there were further levels that were yet to be explored. (A later one, done in Smalltalk was the PIE system by Goldstein and Bobrow, one of my favorite meta-systems)
replies(1): >>11946620 #
1. phaedrus ◴[21 Jun 16 15:53 UTC] No.11946620{6}[source]▶
Aside from metaprogramming, from reading the "four reports" document that is the first Google link, it seems PIE also addresses another hard problem. In any hierarchically organized program, there are always related pieces of code that we would like to maintain together, but which get ripped apart and spread out because the hierarchy was split according to a different set of aspects. You can't get around this problem because if you change what criteria the hierarchy is split on in order to put these pieces near each other, now you've ripped apart code that was related on the original aspect. I've come to the conclusion that hierarchical code organization itself is the problem, and we would be better served by a way to assemble programs relationally (in the sense of an RDBMS). It seems like PIE was in that same conceptual space. Could you comment on that or elaborate more on the PIE system? Thanks.
replies(1): >>11946681 #
2. alankay1 ◴[21 Jun 16 15:59 UTC] No.11946681[source]▶
Good insights -- and check out Alex Warth's "Worlds" paper on the Viewpoints site -- this goes beyond what PIE could do with "possible worlds" reasoning and computing ...
replies(1): >>11946986 #
3. phaedrus ◴[21 Jun 16 16:35 UTC] No.11946986[source]▶
This is a very interesting paper. Its invocation of state space over time as a model of program side effects reminds me of an idea I had a couple years ago: if you think of a program as an entity in state-space where one dimension is time, then "private" object members in OO-programming and immutable values in functional programming are actually manifestations of the same underlying concept. Both are ways to create fences in the state-space-time of a program. Private members create fences along a "space" axis and functional programming creates fences along the "time" axis.
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4. jacques_chester ◴[21 Jun 16 21:06 UTC] No.11949405{3}[source]▶
And you get to use "relational" and "relativity" side by side in a discussion.

A lot of interesting things tend to happen when you introduce invariants, including "everything-is-a" invariants. Everything is a file, everything is an object, everything is a function, everything is a relation, etc.