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.

I think object is a very powerful idea to wrap "local" context. But in a network (communication) environment, it is still challenging to handle "remote" context with object. That is why we have APIs and serialization/deserialization overhead.

In the ideal homogeneous world of smalltalk, it is a less issue. But if you want a Windows machine to talk to a Unix, the remote context becomes an issue.

In principle we can send a Windows VM along with the message from Windows and a Unix VM (docker?) with a message from Unix, if that is a solution.

This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen.

Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...

It's hard for me to grasp what this negotiation would look like. Particularly with objects that haven't encountered each other. It just seems like such a huge problem.

I don't really know anything at all about microbiology, but maybe climbing the ladder of abstraction to small insects like ants. There is clearly negotiation and communication happening there, but I have to think it's pretty well bounded. Even if one ant encountered another ant, and needed to communicate where food was, it's with a fixed set of semantics that are already understood by both parties.

Or with honeybees, doing the communication dance. I have no idea if the communication goes beyond "food here" or if it's "we need to decide who to send out."

It seems like you have to have learning in the object to really negotiate with something it hasn't encountered before. Maybe I'm making things too hard.

Maybe "can we communicate" is the first negotiation, and if not, give up.