This was already useful with him saying that Barton was a brilliant engineer. I have one paper with his name on it, sent by pjmlp, that describes his design of modern computing:
He describes need for ALGOL-like programming languages, how they'll be implemented, training people, and early notions of hardware/software co-design. Also, touches on various aspects of ALGOL that could be turned into a CPU. Later, helps design and build one that's essentially the first, business mainframe plus the first of mostly-safe, truly-engineered computers.
Later, another Burroughs guy, Anderson, uses similar engineering mindset invents INFOSEC per Roger Schell who expanded on his work. Another hired by Intel puts the MMU and segments in there to give security developers a chance. All may ultimately trace to Barton's work and framework for thinking about machines from high-level to hardware. Worth highlighting and becoming more clear thanks to Kay's little remark that tells me who brains of operation probably was among many author's names I see in various places.
Note: Reading this, he may be the inventor of practical, abstract machines as computing solutions. He also taught lots of success stories in industry. Wonder what else he would've done if he stayed in industry.
Bob Barton is in a class of early computer people I don't think can be over-praised. However, just to put a caution on the hyperbole, I had been a journeyman programmer in the Air Force and then at NCAR -- the latter to work my way through the last two years of college -- and I just "didn't know anything" except how to code a little and design a little. When I got to grad school 50 years ago in 1966, I was immediately confronted by Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad, the first Simula, many other things in the actual field, and especially in the ARPA community, and ... Bob Barton himself, who Dave Evans had convinced to be on the Utah faculty for a few years (something he was uncomfortable with).
In any case, this was like someone going from the 10th century to the 20th century, where as Arthur C Clarke pointed out, "Advanced science resembles magic". I am quite surprised 50 years later to still feel the same way about these people, but my initial impressions have stuck. They seemed and do seem: magical.
I've described Bob a little in "The Early History of Smalltalk" that I wrote for the ACM in 1993 http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/. A truly amazing character (and I should try to write a portrait of him at some point).
Both the details, and especially the overall design philosophy of the Burroughs machines are worth close study. What was attempted in the B5000 and B5500 was breathtaking, and as is often the case, perhaps too much in a few places (this happened in the later Flex Machine as well, and in the much later Intel 432).
At Parc in the 70s we were able to take a second pass at "higher level architectures" (and so did Bob Barton at Burroughs with the B1700) via mixing microcode with fixed functions.
The Parc approach was much simpler and less comprehensive (had to work on relatively inexpensive personal computers, and we had a truly wonderful engineering mind in Chuck Thacker who was instrumental in retaining powerful ideas in a parsimonious fashion).
But this hybrid turned out extremely well for a wide variety of needs to make "well-fitted-processors" for higher level languages. Part of the need for the hybrid was to tinker with various kinds of storage schemes, formats, garbage collection, swapping, etc., that were not well understood enough to be put directly into hardware (this was one of the two or three slight flaws in the B5000 scheme).
I commend the "The Approach ..." (1961) paper listed above as one of the great papers in our field -- and it must be in the top two or three for max content in six pages. I should also note that Bob was a mathematician, thought like a mathematician, and designed like a mathematician -- engineering was more of a hobby for him (and not one that he always paid a lot of attention to). I had some of the same "hangups" -- including being a constant reader of everything -- and these were part of the basis of our relationship.
We asked Alan to do an AMA a while ago and he said yes, but having him show up to comment on the topic of a given thread is in a way even better. I thought those comments were pure gold. If you missed them, take a look.
Alan and his group joining YC is the most mind-blowing thing to happen (for me) since I started working on HN. No one has influenced me more in thinking about computing, and his tireless work in talking about computing history (especially the work and culture around ARPA) is a true service. Watching his talks seems to be the only easy place to get that information, and when you start doing it it's like one of those dreams where you enter into a wing of your house that you didn't know existed.
Edit: One of my dreams for HN is for this community to become active in recovering, learning, and extending the computing culture that Alan talks about, which is so much more satisfying than the morass of complexity we mostly find ourselves bogged down in.
> it's like one of those dreams where you enter into a wing of your house that you didn't know existed.
Wait. How common is this?
(I've had these dreams semi-frequently over the last 3 years, but no one else I've told about them has volunteered that they've had any similar experience.)
I tend to agree. The AMA format doesn't really allow for the kind of depth that Kay's top level answer to the OOP question has...
...or the same context for digesting it. I came across it when it was a day old and wondered about McCarthy's Temporal Logic and when Google didn't turn anything up I thought about requesting a link, but the asynchronous format led me to forgo the low value inquiry and I wound up spending enough time to figure out enough to temporarily sate my curiosity instead of checking likes on the Facebook.
On object "states" as recorded object history (snapshots in time?):
"The just computed stable state is very useful. It will never be changed again -- so it represents a "version" of the system simulation -- and it can be safely used as value sources for the functional transitions to the next stable state. It can also be used as sources for creating visualizations of the world at that instant. The history can be used for debugging, undos, roll-backs, etc.
"In this model -- again partly from McCarthy, Strachey, Simula, etc., -- "time doesn't exist between stable states": the "clock" only advances when each new state is completed. The CPU itself doesn't act as a clock as far as programs are concerned.
This gives rise to a very simple way to do deterministic relationships that has an intrinsic and clean model of time.
"For a variety of reasons -- none of them very good -- this way of being safe lost out in the 60s in favor of allowing race conditions in imperative programming and then trying to protect against them using terrible semaphores, etc which can lead to lock ups."
Oh, my kingdom for atomic, history-recording (and replayable) object states! Safety existed in this fashion in the 60s!! I didn't know this, and now I'm sad.
Race conditions continue to haunt us all to this day, especially as languages start supporting concurrency and parallelism primitively. (Not to mention that debugging race conditions is a nightmare - a nod to the Go language devs for making clear a race condition caused a crash in the stack trace.)
You will be even more sad when you start researching the history of operating systems and systems programming and discover the safety that we already had in the 60's in systems like Burroughs that was destroyed by UNIX's industry adoption.
The "Alan Kay"-style moment of Hacker News for me was when I posted a link to article describing sendfile, tcp_nodelay and tcp_nopush. The article referred to Nagle's algorithm when describing tcp_nodelay and described the problem incorrectly. And lo and behold, Nagle itself came to enlighten the uninformed.
And quite frankly, that's what I've been doing...for example http://objective.st -> if you have a way of talking about and playing with architectural elements (mostly the connectors), the rest does pretty much fall out.
A friend of mine made a service that does this. (Iirc it's called HNwatcher)
I follow a small number of people with it and periodically get emails about their new posts. I think some companies use it to track mentions of their company or product as well.
A follow feature would be nice but this is currently filling the gap for me.
Dr. Kay, if you're still following... then with singular respect and gratitude for your life-changing work and ideas, I would like to ask you one question.
Is there a good way to use bad systems?
Such as the web, which you describe as a “broken wheel,” lacking even a fraction
of (e.g.) Englebart's vision. Or Linux, which you call “a budget of bad ideas.”
(And no small budget, at that.) Or the iPad (and all common tablets, I assume),
whose interface you call “brain dead.”[0]
What should we do with these things? Are they dead ends? Are they good for
anything? Can they not be salvaged incrementally?
Here in the Hacker News community, where I am happy to see that my enthusiasm
about your work and message is strongly shared, there is yet a huge amount of
energy being poured into the wrong end of the low-pass filter, or, as you call
it, “the world.” I know that we are not averse to learning curves, but maybe
there is too much sunk cost to question what's already “working”? What should
we do?
One answer is to use bad systems to simulate better ones. But—when this is even
feasible—it's always done at the cost of performance, and VPRI's publications
make no secret of that. A proof-of-concept does not equal a product. And at
any rate, most of us are not researchers.
Because of this apparent dilemma, the exhiliration that I always feel when I
hear you speak or read your writing is always tainted with a sense of despair.
Is there any enlightened way to use today's systems (for example, as application
developers), or should all of our efforts be directed at fixing (or indeed
replacing) the systems themselves?
Thank you again, for all that you've done and continue to do.
I just found your comment. One answer wrt e.g. Javascript is to use it as a "machine code" and just put a whole better designed thing on top of it. Or try to get the web world to get behind Native Client or something better that allows a protected sandbox to be really developed into new facilities.
Another answer is to not to go back to Engelbart, but to at least start with large ideas like his, and try to think of the Internet and Personal Computing as something much more than a convenience -- but more as a "lifter" of humanity. What would that mean?
Another ploy would be to simply think about what is needed close to the end-users and to follow that back towards the plug in the wall (one hint is that there is no need to encounter a 60s style "operating system" -- so what would be much better in a real Internet universe?)
The main heuristic is to posit "I don't really know what I'm doing, and I'm not a strong enough thinker, and 'You can't learn to see until you admit you are blind, and etc." This is my starting place for trying to do real thinking i.e. we aren't as smart as we need to be -- so we have to put real work and method into thinking and design.
Tony Hoare had a good observation. He said that debugging is harder than programming, so don't use all your abilities in programming, or you'll never get the program working. We can extend that into design. Design is difficult, but being able to assess one's designs is even harder -- leave something in reserve to avoid simply making things because we can.
Alan Kay's response to the Dijkstra quote was wonderful. I'd always appreciated Kay's calling out Dijkstra, but that he was amused and not angered by Dijkstra's attitude is great.
Since one of my professors forced all students to learn Smalltalk I deeply respect Alan Kay. This language is so consistent and readable at the same time. Whenever I heard a story of him or saw something he had done this respect grows.
But somehow I stick to code in golang in my spare time. I am afraid I will never see a language designed by Alan Kay and Ken Thompson together ;-)
Have you tried Pharo[0], which is trying to be a modern Smalltalk-like? There is a free online course[1] going on at the moment as well (French videos but subtitled), it's really good.
The idea that The Glass Bees is "little-known" is ... curious. It was republished by New York Review Books, not exactly a small little press no one's ever heard of.
That was my entirely-unthought-through phrase in sending the link to Craig, but I can tell you what I meant by it: I've heard of Ernst Junger and had no idea of that book. I still think it's bizarre and cool that he wrote anything like it (WWI novelist crossed with Philip K. Dick-level bizarre and cool), which is why the comment struck me as a highlight.
But I think NYRB's press exists specifically to bring little-known things to light. Ivy Compton-Burnett, anyone?
(We use an internal chat channel to mention links for the highlight list, but also lots of other stuff that shows up on HN on a given day. Probably the streams got crossed.)
This over the top hero worship is part of the HN culture that I just can't get behind. Alan Kay has an impressive resume but so do a lot of people on here.
Political rallying behind a famous name only leads to the hangers-on getting a free ride to the top and keeps me standing far clear of the corporate world. I'm here to discuss the latest news.
The conversations with Alan Kay led to more pieces of our field's history coming out so people can understand how and why things were related. That's interesting in its own right. It sometimes also helps inform us of how to do the next thing given the situation we're in as history often repeats in new forms. Especially in IT.
The computer industry is in constant danger of losing sight of the early pioneering work in CS, much of which is still relevant and under-applied. Alan Kay and many other titans in the field play a vital role in helping us rediscover what might otherwise be lost.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
https://de.scribd.com/doc/61812037/Barton-B5000
He describes need for ALGOL-like programming languages, how they'll be implemented, training people, and early notions of hardware/software co-design. Also, touches on various aspects of ALGOL that could be turned into a CPU. Later, helps design and build one that's essentially the first, business mainframe plus the first of mostly-safe, truly-engineered computers.
http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...
Later, another Burroughs guy, Anderson, uses similar engineering mindset invents INFOSEC per Roger Schell who expanded on his work. Another hired by Intel puts the MMU and segments in there to give security developers a chance. All may ultimately trace to Barton's work and framework for thinking about machines from high-level to hardware. Worth highlighting and becoming more clear thanks to Kay's little remark that tells me who brains of operation probably was among many author's names I see in various places.
Has Wikipedia page it turns out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_S._Barton
Note: Reading this, he may be the inventor of practical, abstract machines as computing solutions. He also taught lots of success stories in industry. Wonder what else he would've done if he stayed in industry.
[+] [-] alankay1|9 years ago|reply
In any case, this was like someone going from the 10th century to the 20th century, where as Arthur C Clarke pointed out, "Advanced science resembles magic". I am quite surprised 50 years later to still feel the same way about these people, but my initial impressions have stuck. They seemed and do seem: magical.
I've described Bob a little in "The Early History of Smalltalk" that I wrote for the ACM in 1993 http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/. A truly amazing character (and I should try to write a portrait of him at some point).
Both the details, and especially the overall design philosophy of the Burroughs machines are worth close study. What was attempted in the B5000 and B5500 was breathtaking, and as is often the case, perhaps too much in a few places (this happened in the later Flex Machine as well, and in the much later Intel 432).
At Parc in the 70s we were able to take a second pass at "higher level architectures" (and so did Bob Barton at Burroughs with the B1700) via mixing microcode with fixed functions.
The Parc approach was much simpler and less comprehensive (had to work on relatively inexpensive personal computers, and we had a truly wonderful engineering mind in Chuck Thacker who was instrumental in retaining powerful ideas in a parsimonious fashion).
But this hybrid turned out extremely well for a wide variety of needs to make "well-fitted-processors" for higher level languages. Part of the need for the hybrid was to tinker with various kinds of storage schemes, formats, garbage collection, swapping, etc., that were not well understood enough to be put directly into hardware (this was one of the two or three slight flaws in the B5000 scheme).
I commend the "The Approach ..." (1961) paper listed above as one of the great papers in our field -- and it must be in the top two or three for max content in six pages. I should also note that Bob was a mathematician, thought like a mathematician, and designed like a mathematician -- engineering was more of a hobby for him (and not one that he always paid a lot of attention to). I had some of the same "hangups" -- including being a constant reader of everything -- and these were part of the basis of our relationship.
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
Alan and his group joining YC is the most mind-blowing thing to happen (for me) since I started working on HN. No one has influenced me more in thinking about computing, and his tireless work in talking about computing history (especially the work and culture around ARPA) is a true service. Watching his talks seems to be the only easy place to get that information, and when you start doing it it's like one of those dreams where you enter into a wing of your house that you didn't know existed.
Edit: One of my dreams for HN is for this community to become active in recovering, learning, and extending the computing culture that Alan talks about, which is so much more satisfying than the morass of complexity we mostly find ourselves bogged down in.
[+] [-] wwweston|9 years ago|reply
Wait. How common is this?
(I've had these dreams semi-frequently over the last 3 years, but no one else I've told about them has volunteered that they've had any similar experience.)
[+] [-] pnathan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|9 years ago|reply
I tend to agree. The AMA format doesn't really allow for the kind of depth that Kay's top level answer to the OOP question has...
...or the same context for digesting it. I came across it when it was a day old and wondered about McCarthy's Temporal Logic and when Google didn't turn anything up I thought about requesting a link, but the asynchronous format led me to forgo the low value inquiry and I wound up spending enough time to figure out enough to temporarily sate my curiosity instead of checking likes on the Facebook.
[+] [-] mej10|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asimuvPR|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akkartik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] themartorana|9 years ago|reply
"The just computed stable state is very useful. It will never be changed again -- so it represents a "version" of the system simulation -- and it can be safely used as value sources for the functional transitions to the next stable state. It can also be used as sources for creating visualizations of the world at that instant. The history can be used for debugging, undos, roll-backs, etc.
"In this model -- again partly from McCarthy, Strachey, Simula, etc., -- "time doesn't exist between stable states": the "clock" only advances when each new state is completed. The CPU itself doesn't act as a clock as far as programs are concerned. This gives rise to a very simple way to do deterministic relationships that has an intrinsic and clean model of time.
"For a variety of reasons -- none of them very good -- this way of being safe lost out in the 60s in favor of allowing race conditions in imperative programming and then trying to protect against them using terrible semaphores, etc which can lead to lock ups."
Oh, my kingdom for atomic, history-recording (and replayable) object states! Safety existed in this fashion in the 60s!! I didn't know this, and now I'm sad.
Race conditions continue to haunt us all to this day, especially as languages start supporting concurrency and parallelism primitively. (Not to mention that debugging race conditions is a nightmare - a nod to the Go language devs for making clear a race condition caused a crash in the stack trace.)
[+] [-] pjmlp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jgon|9 years ago|reply
Check out the rest of the experiments that VPRI been pursuing here: http://vpri.org/html/writings.php
[+] [-] protomyth|9 years ago|reply
You might want to check out John McCarthy's Elephant and its follow-ons. http://web.archive.org/web/20130729203501id_/http://itc.conv...
Its not exactly what you want, but it is down that road.
[+] [-] firasd|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dirtyaura|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9045125
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
It still bothers me that the Nagle algorithm (which I called tinygram prevention) and delayed ACKs interact so badly.
Mark of a true engineer.
[+] [-] mpweiher|9 years ago|reply
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...
And quite frankly, that's what I've been doing...for example http://objective.st -> if you have a way of talking about and playing with architectural elements (mostly the connectors), the rest does pretty much fall out.
[+] [-] noblethrasher|9 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8618736
It was my secret pride for the longest time, even though I was the one getting schooled.
[+] [-] vonnik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkmurakami|9 years ago|reply
I follow a small number of people with it and periodically get emails about their new posts. I think some companies use it to track mentions of their company or product as well.
A follow feature would be nice but this is currently filling the gap for me.
[+] [-] gavinpc|9 years ago|reply
Is there a good way to use bad systems?
Such as the web, which you describe as a “broken wheel,” lacking even a fraction of (e.g.) Englebart's vision. Or Linux, which you call “a budget of bad ideas.” (And no small budget, at that.) Or the iPad (and all common tablets, I assume), whose interface you call “brain dead.”[0]
What should we do with these things? Are they dead ends? Are they good for anything? Can they not be salvaged incrementally?
Here in the Hacker News community, where I am happy to see that my enthusiasm about your work and message is strongly shared, there is yet a huge amount of energy being poured into the wrong end of the low-pass filter, or, as you call it, “the world.” I know that we are not averse to learning curves, but maybe there is too much sunk cost to question what's already “working”? What should we do?
One answer is to use bad systems to simulate better ones. But—when this is even feasible—it's always done at the cost of performance, and VPRI's publications make no secret of that. A proof-of-concept does not equal a product. And at any rate, most of us are not researchers.
Because of this apparent dilemma, the exhiliration that I always feel when I hear you speak or read your writing is always tainted with a sense of despair. Is there any enlightened way to use today's systems (for example, as application developers), or should all of our efforts be directed at fixing (or indeed replacing) the systems themselves?
Thank you again, for all that you've done and continue to do.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=28m
https://archive.org/details/130124AlanKayFull
And others. I believe that these quotes are representative and not misused out of context.
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
Another answer is to not to go back to Engelbart, but to at least start with large ideas like his, and try to think of the Internet and Personal Computing as something much more than a convenience -- but more as a "lifter" of humanity. What would that mean?
Another ploy would be to simply think about what is needed close to the end-users and to follow that back towards the plug in the wall (one hint is that there is no need to encounter a 60s style "operating system" -- so what would be much better in a real Internet universe?)
The main heuristic is to posit "I don't really know what I'm doing, and I'm not a strong enough thinker, and 'You can't learn to see until you admit you are blind, and etc." This is my starting place for trying to do real thinking i.e. we aren't as smart as we need to be -- so we have to put real work and method into thinking and design.
Tony Hoare had a good observation. He said that debugging is harder than programming, so don't use all your abilities in programming, or you'll never get the program working. We can extend that into design. Design is difficult, but being able to assess one's designs is even harder -- leave something in reserve to avoid simply making things because we can.
[+] [-] justin66|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JepZ|9 years ago|reply
But somehow I stick to code in golang in my spare time. I am afraid I will never see a language designed by Alan Kay and Ken Thompson together ;-)
Thx for the HN Alan Kay Edition
[+] [-] vanderZwan|9 years ago|reply
[0] http://pharo.org/
[1] https://www.fun-mooc.fr/courses/inria/41010/session01/
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousgal|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xufi|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenko|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
But I think NYRB's press exists specifically to bring little-known things to light. Ivy Compton-Burnett, anyone?
[+] [-] minimaxir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
(We use an internal chat channel to mention links for the highlight list, but also lots of other stuff that shows up on HN on a given day. Probably the streams got crossed.)
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] syngrog66|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|9 years ago|reply
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11839876 and marked it off-topic.
[+] [-] alankay1|9 years ago|reply
Which one were you hoping for?
[+] [-] jcoffland|9 years ago|reply
Political rallying behind a famous name only leads to the hangers-on getting a free ride to the top and keeps me standing far clear of the corporate world. I'm here to discuss the latest news.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nekopa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanBC|9 years ago|reply
> I'm here to discuss the latest news.
From 2008: https://web.archive.org/web/20080616133301/http://ycombinato...
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.