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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 8 comments | 20 Jun 16 18:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.614s | source | bottom

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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wdanilo ◴[20 Jun 16 21:16 UTC] No.11941656[source]▶
Hi Alan! I've got some assumptions regarding the upcoming big paradigm shift (and I believe it will happen sooner than later):

1. focus on data processing rather than imperative way of thinking (esp. functional programming)

2. abstraction over parallelism and distributed systems

3. interactive collaboration between developers

4. development accessible to a much broader audience, especially to domain experts, without sacrificing power users

In fact the startup I'm working in aims exactly in this direction. We have created a purely functional visual<->textual language Luna ( http://www.luna-lang.org ).

By visual<->textual I mean that you can always switch between code, graph and vice versa.

What do you think about these assumptions?

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alankay ◴[21 Jun 16 14:14 UTC] No.11945722[source]▶
What if "data" is a really bad idea?
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richhickey ◴[21 Jun 16 14:34 UTC] No.11945869[source]▶
Data like that sentence? Or all of the other sentences in this chat? I find 'data' hard to consider a bad idea in and of itself, i.e. if data == information, records of things known/uttered at a point in time. Could you talk more about data being a bad idea?
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1. mmiller ◴[21 Jun 16 19:28 UTC] No.11948698[source]▶
Take a look here:

https://tekkie.wordpress.com/2010/07/05/sicp-what-is-meant-b...

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2. richhickey ◴[21 Jun 16 19:53 UTC] No.11948919[source]▶
Data, and the entirety of human understanding and knowledge derived from recording, measurement and analysis of data, predates computing, so I don't see the relevance of these recent, programming-centric notions in a discussion of its value.
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3. asolove ◴[22 Jun 16 20:13 UTC] No.11956624[source]▶
Wouldn't Mr. Kay say that it is education that builds the continuity of the entirety of human understanding? Greek philosophy and astronomy survived in the Muslim world and not in the European, though both possessed plenty of texts, because only the former had an education system that could bootstrap a mind to think in a way capable of understanding and adding to the data. Ultimately, every piece of data is reliant on each generation of humans equipping enough of their children with the mindset capable to use it intelligently.

The value of data is determined by the intelligence of those interpreting it, not those who recorded it.

Of course, this dynamic is sometimes positive. The Babylonians kept excellent astronomical records though apparently making little theoretical advance in understanding them. Greeks with an excellent grasp of geometry put that data to much better use very quickly. But if they had had to wait to gather the data themselves, one can imagine them waiting a long time.

4. david927 ◴[23 Jun 16 00:20 UTC] No.11958060[source]▶
What if "data" is a really great idea?
5. mempko ◴[23 Jun 16 00:53 UTC] No.11958182[source]▶
Computing has existed for thousands of years. We just have machines do some of it now.
6. NotUsingLinux ◴[23 Jun 16 07:15 UTC] No.11959368[source]▶
Your blog looks very interesting. You should share some links of it here on hackernews!
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7. mmiller ◴[24 Jun 16 01:02 UTC] No.11965503[source]▶
Thanks. I share it wherever I think it will add to the discussion.
8. mmiller ◴[24 Jun 16 01:38 UTC] No.11965656[source]▶
This kind of gets into philosophy, but a metaphor I came up with for thinking about this (another phrase for it is "thought experiment") is:

If I speak something to a rock, what is it to the rock? Is it "signal," or "data"?

Making the concept a little more interesting, what if I resonate the rock with a sound frequency? What is that to the rock? Is that "signal," or "data"?

Up until the Rosetta Stone was found, Egyptian hieroglyphs were indecipherable. Could data be gathered from them, nevertheless? Sure. Researchers could determine what pigments were used, and/or what tools were used to create them, but they couldn't understand the messages. It wasn't "data" up to that point. It was "noise."

I hope I am not giving the impression that I am a postmodernist who is out here saying, "Data is meaningless." That's not what I'm saying. I am saying meaning is not self-evident from signal. The concept of data requires the ability to interpret signal for meaning to be acquired.