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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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wdanilo ◴[20 Jun 16 21:16 UTC] No.11941656[source]▶
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?

replies(2): >>11942789 #>>11945722 #
alankay ◴[21 Jun 16 14:14 UTC] No.11945722[source]▶
What if "data" is a really bad idea?
replies(3): >>11945869 #>>11956981 #>>11984719 #
1. mbrodersen ◴[27 Jun 16 07:48 UTC] No.11984719[source]▶
Data is semantically defined by the processes using/interpreting it. Not by the data itself. So Rich Hickey is right and Alan Kay is wrong.