Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today

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?

What if "data" is a really bad idea?

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?

What is "data" without an interpreter (and when we send "data" somewhere, how can we send it so its meaning is preserved?)

Data without an interpreter is certainly subject to (multiple) interpretation :) For instance, the implications of your sentence weren't clear to me, in spite of it being in English (evidently, not indicated otherwise). Some metadata indicated to me that you said it (should I trust that?), and when. But these seem to be questions of quality of representation/conveyance/provenance (agreed, important) rather than critiques of data as an idea. Yes, there is a notion of sufficiency ('42' isn't data).

Data is an old and fundamental idea. Machine interpretation of un- or under-structured data is fueling a ton of utility for society. None of the inputs to our sensory systems are accompanied by explanations of their meaning. Data - something given, seems the raw material of pretty much everything else interesting, and interpreters are secondary, and perhaps essentially, varied.

There are lots of "old and fundamental" ideas that are not good anymore, if they ever were.

The point here is that you were able to find the interpreter of the sentence and ask a question, but the two were still separated. For important negotiations we don't send telegrams, we send ambassadors.

This is what objects are all about, and it continues to be amazing to me that the real necessities and practical necessities are still not at all understood. Bundling an interpreter for messages doesn't prevent the message from being submitted for other possible interpretations, but there simply has to be a process that can extract signal from noise.

This is particularly germane to your last paragraph. Please think especially hard about what you are taking for granted in your last sentence.

Isn't the interpreter code itself data in the sense that it has no meaning without something (a machine) to run it? How do you avoid having to send an interpreter for the interpreter and so on?

Yes, so think about how to make this work "nicely" in an Intergalactic Network ...

It can't be turtles all the way down, so maybe set theory?

A good question isn't it?

For parallel ideas and situation, take a look at Lincos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_(artificial_language)