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Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

1401 points alankay | 2 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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Ericson2314 ◴[20 Jun 16 18:38 UTC] No.11940189[source]▶
Alan, while trying come up with a good question, I learned you are a musician. Great! As a fellow musician (also jazz and classical) I'm curious whether you feel this has influenced your engineering.
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alankay1 ◴[21 Jun 16 15:14 UTC] No.11946241[source]▶
I'm not really an engineer -- but yes music furnishes many good parallels and metaphors ...
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Ericson2314 ◴[22 Jun 16 06:18 UTC] No.11951912[source]▶
Glad to hear it! I would certainly agree.

[Do you prefer "[computer] science", "design", or another term? I personally get a bit queasy about calling it "science" when the field isn't centered around experiments and their analysis. Moreover "sciencing" is not a verb :).]

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1. alankay1 ◴[22 Jun 16 11:55 UTC] No.11953132{3}[source]▶
I like "computer science" when doing real "computer science". Science is making explanatory models from and about phenomena and looking for more phenomena.

Most of the time I think I'm "designing".

In English "sciencing" can be a verb. And there's the great line from "The Martian" -- "I'm going to have to science the shit out of this!"

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2. Ericson2314 ◴[26 Jun 16 20:18 UTC] No.11982487[source]▶
That makes sense. Heh, didn't seee that movie but good quote.