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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: 0.243s | 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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dineshp2 ◴[21 Jun 16 09:54 UTC] No.11944636[source]▶
Hi Alan!

From your comments, it's clear that you are not happy with the state of programming languages as it stands.

You mentioned that the current languages lack safe meta-definition and also that the next generation of languages should make us think better.

Apart from the above, could you mention more properties or features of programming languages, at a high level of course, that you consider should be part of the next generation of languages?

replies(1): >>11953845 #
1. alankay1 ◴[22 Jun 16 13:48 UTC] No.11953845[source]▶
I've written and talked about this over the last decade or so. I think a huge problem in even thinking about this is that the people who should be thinking about it have gotten very fluent in many ways of "programming" that are almost certainly not just obsolete but make it very difficult to think about what are likely to be the most important issues of today.

If we look at CAD->SIM->FAB in various engineering fields -- mechanical, electrical, biological, etc. -- we see something more like what is needed. From another view, if we look at the great need for designing and assessing, etc. we can see that the representations we need for "requirements", "specs", "legalities", etc have to be debuggable, have to run, and might as well just flow into a new kind of "CAD->SIM->FAB" process for programming. A lot of what has to happen is to replace main-stream "hows" with "whats" (and have many of the hows be automatic, and all of them "from the side).