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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).
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CharlesMerriam2 ◴[20 Jun 16 18:19 UTC] No.11939986[source]▶
Many mainstream programming tools feel to be moving backwards. For example, Saber-C of the 1980s allowed hot-editing without restarting processes and graphical data structures. Similarly, the ability to experiment with collections of code before assembling them into a function was advance.

Do you hold much hope for our development environments helping us think?

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extrapickles ◴[20 Jun 16 20:08 UTC] No.11941076[source]▶
Yes. I think they have been slowly getting better.

Visual Studio has let you do hot code editing for over a decade now, they call it "Edit and Continue"[0]. Only works for some languages (C#, Visual Basic/C++). It also lets you modify the program state while stopped on a break-point with code of your devising.

Most browsers also let you adhoc compose and run code without modifying the underlying programs.

Thanks to hardware performance counters, profilers are now able to profile code with much less impact on performance (eg: no more adjusting timeouts due to profiler overhead). Network debuggers are getting better at decoding traffic and displaying it in a more human readable format (eg: automatic gzip decompression, stream reassembly, etc).

[0]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bcew296c.aspx

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drivers99 ◴[21 Jun 16 21:39 UTC] No.11949620[source]▶
BASIC also did this on pretty much every microcomputer in the 1980s.
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1. mmiller ◴[22 Jun 16 06:32 UTC] No.11951958[source]▶
Kind of, but it was clunkier. You could Break out of an executing program, edit the code you wanted, and then type CONT to continue execution from the break point. The state from that point forward might not be what you want, though. At least inside VS it tries to revert state so that the revision executes as if the state came into it "clean."