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).
When you were envisioning today's computers in the 70s you seemed to have been focused mostly on the educational benefits but it turns out that these devices are even better for entertainment to the point were they are dangerously addictive and steal time away from education. Do you have any thoughts on interfaces that guide the brain away from its worst impulses and towards more productive uses?
We were mostly thinking of "human advancement" or as Engelbart's group termed it "Human Augmentation" -- this includes education along with lots of other things. I remember noting that if Moore's Law were to go a decade beyond 1995 (Moore's original extrapolation) that things like television and other "legal drugs" would be possible. We already had a very good sense of this before TV things were possible from noting how attractive early video games -- like SpaceWar -- were. This is a part of an industrial civilization being able to produce surpluses (the "industrial" part) with the "civilization" part being how well children can be helped to learn not to give into the cravings of genetics in a world of over-plenty. This is a huge problem in a culture like the US in which making money is rather separated from worrying about how the money is made.
...In programming there is a wide-spread 1st order
theory that one shouldn’t build one’s own tools,
languages, and especially operating systems. This is
true—an incredible amount of time and energy has gone
down these ratholes. On the 2nd hand, if you can build
your own tools, languages and operating systems, then
you absolutely should because the leverage that can be
obtained (and often the time not wasted in trying to
fix other people’s not quite right tools) can be
incredible.
I love this quote because it justifies a DIY attitude of experimentation and reverse engineering, etc., that generally I think we could use more of.
However, more often than not, I find the sentiment paralyzing. There's so much that one could probably learn to build themselves, but as things become more and more complex, one has to be able to make a rational tradeoff between spending the time and energy in the rathole, or not. I can't spend all day rebuilding everything I can simply because I can.
My question is: how does one decide when to DIY, and when to use what's already been built?
1. If you were to design a new programming paradigm today using what we have learnt about OOP what would it be?
2. With VR and AR (Hololens) becoming a reality (heh) how do you see user interfaces changing to work better with these systems? What new things need to be invented or rethought?
3. I also worked at Xerox for a number of years although not at PARC. I was always frustrated by their attitude to new ideas and lack of interest in new technologies until everyone else was doing it. Obviously businesses change over time and it has been a long time since Xerox were a technology leader. If you could pick your best and worst memories from Xerox what would they be?
Cheers for your time and all your amazing work over the years :)
1. After Engelbart's group disbanded it seemed like he ended up in the wilderness for a long time, and focused his attention on management. I'll project onto him and would guess that he felt more constrained by his social or economic context than he was by technology, that he envisioned possibilities that were unattainable for reasons that weren't technical. I'm curious if you do or have felt the same way, and if have any intuitions about how to approach those problems.
3. I've found the Situated Learning perspective interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning). At least I think about it when I feel grumpy about all the young kids and Node.js, and I genuinely like that they are excited about what they are doing, but it seems like they are on a mission to rediscover EVERYTHING, one technology and one long discussion at a time. But they are a community of learning, and maybe everyone (or every community) does have to do that if they are to apply creativity and take ownership over the next step. Is there a better way?
It used to be the case that people were admonished to "not re-invent the wheel". We now live in an age that spends a lot of time "reinventing the flat tire!"
The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...
1. what do you think about the hardware we are using as foundation of computing today? I remember you mentioning about how cool was the architecture of the Burroughs B5000 [1] being prepared to run on the metal the higher level programming languages. What do hardware vendors should do to make hardware that is more friendly to higher level programming? Would that help us to be less depending on VM's while still enjoying silicon kind of performance?
2. What software technologies do you feel we're missing?
If you start with "desirable process" you can eventually work your way back to the power plug in the wall. If you start with something already plugged in, you might miss a lot of truly desirable processes.
Part of working your way back to reality can often require new hardware to be made or -- in the case of the days of microcode -- to shape the hardware.
There are lots of things vendors could do. For example: Intel could make its first level caches large enough to make real HLL emulators (and they could look at what else would help). Right now a plug-in or available FPGA could be of great use in many areas. From another direction, one could think of much better ways to organize memory architectures, especially for multi-core chips where they are quite starved.
And so on. We've gone very far down the road of "not very good" matchups, and of vendors getting programmers to make their CPUs useful rather than the exact opposite approach. This is too large a subject for today's AMA.
At my office a lot of the non-programmers (marketers, finance people, customer support, etc) write a fair bit of SQL. I've often wondered what it is about SQL that allows them to get over their fear of programming, since they would never drop into ruby or a "real" programming language. Things I've considered:
* Graphical programming environment (they run the queries
from pgadmin, or Postico, or some app like that)
* Instant feedback - run the query get useful results
* Compilation step with some type safety - will complain
if their query is malformed
* Are tables a "natural" way to think about data for humans?
* Job relevance
Any ideas? Can we learn from that example to make real programming environments that are more "cross functional" in that more people in a company are willing to use them?
Previously you've mentioned the "Oxbridge approach" to reading, whereby--if my recollection is correct--you take four topics and delve into them as much as possible. Could you elaborate on this approach (I've searched the internet, couldn't find anything)? And do you think this structured approach has more benefits than, say, a non-structured approach of reading whatever of interest?
There are more than 23,000,000 books in the Library of Congress, and a good reader might be able to read 23,000 books in a lifetime (I know just a few people who have read more). So we are contemplating a lifetime of reading in which we might touch 1/10th of 1% of the extent books. We would hope that most of the ones we aren't able to touch are not useful or good or etc.
So I think we have to put something more than randomness and following links to use here. (You can spend a lot of time learning about a big system like Linux without hitting many of the most important ideas in computing -- so we have to heed the "Art is long and Life is short" idea.
Part of the "Oxbridge" process is to have a "reader" (a person who helps you choose what to look at), and these people are worth their weight in gold ...
Was it in The Future of Reading [1] perhaps? From page 6:
In a very different approach, most music and sports learning only has contact with a one on one expert once or twice a week, lots of individual practice, group experiences where “playing” is done, and many years of effort. This works because most learners really have difficulty absorb ing hours of expert instruction every week that may or may not fit their capacities, styles, or rhythms. They are generally much better off spending a few hours every day learning on their own and seeing the expert for assessment and advice and play a few times a week.
A few universities use a process like this for academics—sometimes called the “tutorial system”, they include Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK.
Apologies for rambling on a bit - but I also have some questions about VPRI. As far as I can gather, it was never the intention to publish the entire system (The whole stack needed to get "Frank" running)? If so, I'd like to know why not? Where you afraid that the prototypes would be taken "too seriously" and draw focus away from the ideas you wanted to explore?
The VPRI reports, and before that some of the papers on Croquet (especially the idea of "teatime" which might be described as event-driven, log-based, relative time with eventual data/world-consistency) are fascinating, and I'm grateful for them being published. Also the Ometa-stuff[o] is fascinating (if anything, I think it's gotten too little mind-share).
It seems to me, that we've evolved a bit, in the sense that some things that used to be considered programming (display a text string on screen), no longer is (type it into notepad.exe) -- it's considered "using a computer". At the same time some things that were considered somewhat esoteric is becoming mainstream: perhaps most importantly the growing (resurging?) trend that programming really is meta-programming and language creation.
ReactJS is a mainstream programming model, that fuses html, css, javascript and a at least one templating language - and in a similar vein we see a great adoption in "transpiled" languages, such as coffee script, typescript, clojurescript and more. HN runs on top of Ark, which is a lisp that's been bent hard in the direction of http/html. I see this as a bit of an evolution from when the most common DSLs people were writing for themselves were ORMs - mapping some host language to SQL.
In your time with VPRI - did you find other new patterns or principles for meta-programming and (micro) language design that you think could/should be put to use right now?
Other than the web-developers tendency to reinvent m4 at every turn, in order to program html, css and js at a "higher" level, and the before-mentioned ORM-trends -- the only somewhat mainstream system I am aware of that has a good toolkit for building "real" DSLs, is Racket Scheme (Which shows if one contrasts something like Sphinx, which is a fine system, with Racket's scribble[2]).
Do you think we'll continue to see a rise of meta-programming and language design as more and more tools become available, and it becomes more and more natural to do "real" parsing rather than ad-hoc munging of plain text?
On the "worse is better" divide I've always considered you as someone standing near the "better" (MIT) approach, but with an understanding of the pragmatics inherent in the "worse is better" (New Jersey) approach too.
What is your actual position on the "worse is better" dichotomy?
Do you believe it is real, and if so, can there be a third alternative that combines elements from both sides?
And if not, are we always doomed (due to market forces, programming as "popular culture" etc) to have sub-par tools from what can be theoretically achieved?
I don't think "pop culture" approaches are the best way to do most things (though "every once in a while" something good does happen).
The real question is "does a hack reset 'normal'?" For most people it tends to, and this makes it very difficult for them to think about the actual issues.
A quote I made up some years ago is "Better and Perfect are the enemies of What-Is-Actually-Needed". The big sin so many people commit in computing is not really paying attention to "What-Is-Actually-Needed"! And not going below that.
What advice would you give to those who don't have a HARC to call their own? what would you do to get set up/a community/funding for your adventure if you were starting out today? What advice do you have for those who are currently in an industrial/academic institution who seek the true intellectual freedom you have found? Is it just luck?!
I don't have great advice (I found getting halfway decent funding since 1980 to be quite a chore). I was incredibly lucky to wind up quite accidentally at the U of Utah ARPA project 50 year ago this year.
Part of the deal is being really stubborn about what you want to do -- for example, I've never tried to make money from my ideas (because then you are in a very different kind of process -- and this process is not at all good for the kinds of things I try to do).
Every once in a while one runs into "large minded people" like Sam Altman and Vishal Sikka, who do have access to funding that is unfettered enough to lead to really new ideas.
Hi Alan, the question that troubles me now and I want to ask you is:
Why do you think there is always a difference between:
A. the people who know best how something should be done, and
B. the people who end up doing it in a practical and economically-successful or popular way?
And should we educate our children or develop our businesses in ways that could encourage both practicality and invention? (do you think it's possible?). Or would the two tendencies cancel each other out and you'll end up with mediocre children and underperforming businesses, so the right thing to do is to pick one side and develop it at the expense of the other?
(The "two camps" are clearly obvious in the space of programming language design and UI design (imho it's the same thing: programming languages are just "UIs between programmers and machines"), as you well know and said, with one group of people (you among them) having the right ideas of what OOP and UIs should be like, and one people inventing the technologies with success in industry like C++ and Java. But the pattern is happening at all levels, even business: the people with the best business ideas are almost never the ones who end up doing things and so things get done in a "partially wrong" way most of the time, although we have the information to "do it right".)
As a high school teacher, I often find that discussions of technology in education diminish 'education' to curricular and assessment documentation and planning; however, these artifacts are only a small element of what is, fundamentally, a social process of discussion and progressive knowledge building.
If the real work and progress with my students comes from our intellectual both-and-forth (rather than static documentation of pre-exhibiting knowledge), are there tools I can look to that have been/will be created to empower and enrich this kind of in situ interaction?
This is a tough one to try to produce "through the keyhole" of this very non-WYSIWYG poorly thought through artifact of the WWW people not understanding what either the Internet or computer media are all about.
Let me just say that it's worth trying to understand what might be a "really good" balance between traditional oral culture learning and thinking, what literacy brings to the party, especially via mass media, and what the computer and pervasive networking should bring as real positive additions.
One way to assess what is going on now is partly a retreat from real literacy back to oral modes of communication and oral modes of thought (i.e. "texting" is really a transliteration of an oral utterance, not a literary form).
This is a disaster.
However, even autodidacts really need some oral discussions, and this is one reason to have a "school experience".
The question is balance. Fluent readers can read many times faster than oral transmissions, and there are many more resources at hand. This means in the 21st century that most people should be doing a lot of reading -- especially students (much much more reading than talking). Responsible adults, especially teachers and parents, should be making all out efforts to help this to happen.
For the last point, I'd recommend perusing Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", and this will be a good basis for thinking about tradeoffs between actual interactions (whether with people or computers) and "pondering".
I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs....
-- I was surprised that the HN list page didn't automatically refresh in my browser (seems as though it should be live and not have to be prompted ...)
Imagine:
1. trying to read something long, or
2. going off to a follow a link and to come back and respond,
only to find that the page has been refreshing while you looked away. Now you have to scroll about to find the place you were at in order to respond or to continue reading the comments.
Jaron Lanier mentioned you as part of the, "humanistic thread within computing." I understood him to mean folks who have a much broader appreciation of human experience than the average technologist.
Who are "humanistic technologists" you admire? Critics, artists, experimenters, even trolls... Which especially creative technologists inspire you?
I imagine people like Jonathan Harris, Ze Frank, Jaron Lanier, Ben Huh, danah boyd, Sherry Turkle, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Rushkoff, etc....
What turning points in the history of computing (products that won in the marketplace, inventions that were ignored, technical decisions where the individual/company/committee could've explored a different alternative, etc.) do you wish had gone another way?
Just to pick three (and maybe not even at the top of my list if I were to write it and sort it), are
(a) Intel and Motorola, etc. getting really interested in the Parc HW architectures that allowed Very High Level Languages to be efficiently implemented. Not having this in the 80s brought "not very good ideas from the 50s and 60s" back into programming, and was one of the big factors in:
(b) the huge propensity of "we know how to program" etc., that was the other big factor preventing the best software practices from the 70s from being the start of much better programming, operating systems, etc. in the 1980s, rather the reversion to weak methods (from which we really haven't recovered).
(c) The use of "best ideas about destiny of computing" e.g. in the ARPA community, rather than weak gestures e.g. the really poorly conceived WWW vs the really important and needed ideas of Engelbart.
A lot of the VPRI work involved inventing new languages (DSLs). The results were extremely impressive but there were some extremely impressive people inventing the languages. Do you think this is a practical approach for everyday programmers? You have also recommended before that there should be clear separation between meta model and model. Should there be something similar to discipline a codebase where people are inventing their own languages? Or should just e.g. OS writers invent the languages and everyone else use a lingua franca?
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.
Like many here, I'm a big fan of what you've accomplished in life, and we all owe you a great debt for the great designs and features of technologies we use everyday!
The majority of us have not accomplished as much in technology, and many of us, though a minority, are in the top end of the age bell curve. I'm in that top end.
I've found over the years that I've gone from being frustrated with the churn of software/web development, to completely apathetic about it, to wanting something else- something more meaningful, and then to somewhat of an acceptance that I'm lucky just to be employed and making what I do as an older developer.
I find it very difficult to have the time and energy to focus on new technologies that come out all of the time, and less and less able as my brain perhaps is less plastic to really get into the latest JavaScript framework, etc.
I don't get excited anymore, don't have the motivation, ability, or time to keep up with things like the younger folk. Also, I've even gotten tired of mentoring them, especially as I become less able and therefore less respected.
Have you ever had or known someone that had similar feelings of futility or a serious slowdown in their career? If so, what worked/what didn't and what advice could you provide?
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to everyone you have here. It definitely is much appreciated!
[+] [-] guelo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] di|9 years ago|reply
In "The Power of the Context" (2004) you wrote:
I love this quote because it justifies a DIY attitude of experimentation and reverse engineering, etc., that generally I think we could use more of.However, more often than not, I find the sentiment paralyzing. There's so much that one could probably learn to build themselves, but as things become more and more complex, one has to be able to make a rational tradeoff between spending the time and energy in the rathole, or not. I can't spend all day rebuilding everything I can simply because I can.
My question is: how does one decide when to DIY, and when to use what's already been built?
[+] [-] _ayv0|9 years ago|reply
I have three questions -
1. If you were to design a new programming paradigm today using what we have learnt about OOP what would it be?
2. With VR and AR (Hololens) becoming a reality (heh) how do you see user interfaces changing to work better with these systems? What new things need to be invented or rethought?
3. I also worked at Xerox for a number of years although not at PARC. I was always frustrated by their attitude to new ideas and lack of interest in new technologies until everyone else was doing it. Obviously businesses change over time and it has been a long time since Xerox were a technology leader. If you could pick your best and worst memories from Xerox what would they be?
Cheers for your time and all your amazing work over the years :)
[+] [-] ianbicking|9 years ago|reply
2. What are your opinions on Worse Is Better (https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html)? It seems to me like you pursue the diamond-like jewel, but maybe that's not how you see it. (Just noticed you answered this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940276)
3. I've found the Situated Learning perspective interesting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning). At least I think about it when I feel grumpy about all the young kids and Node.js, and I genuinely like that they are excited about what they are doing, but it seems like they are on a mission to rediscover EVERYTHING, one technology and one long discussion at a time. But they are a community of learning, and maybe everyone (or every community) does have to do that if they are to apply creativity and take ownership over the next step. Is there a better way?
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
The flat tires come from the reinventors often not being in the same league as the original inventors. This is a symptom of a "pop culture" where identity and participation are much more important than progress...
[+] [-] sebastianconcpt|9 years ago|reply
1. what do you think about the hardware we are using as foundation of computing today? I remember you mentioning about how cool was the architecture of the Burroughs B5000 [1] being prepared to run on the metal the higher level programming languages. What do hardware vendors should do to make hardware that is more friendly to higher level programming? Would that help us to be less depending on VM's while still enjoying silicon kind of performance?
2. What software technologies do you feel we're missing?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems
[+] [-] alankay1|9 years ago|reply
Part of working your way back to reality can often require new hardware to be made or -- in the case of the days of microcode -- to shape the hardware.
There are lots of things vendors could do. For example: Intel could make its first level caches large enough to make real HLL emulators (and they could look at what else would help). Right now a plug-in or available FPGA could be of great use in many areas. From another direction, one could think of much better ways to organize memory architectures, especially for multi-core chips where they are quite starved.
And so on. We've gone very far down the road of "not very good" matchups, and of vendors getting programmers to make their CPUs useful rather than the exact opposite approach. This is too large a subject for today's AMA.
[+] [-] losvedir|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IsaacL|9 years ago|reply
Who do you think are the people doing the most interesting work in user interface design today?
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
He is certainly one of the most interesting and best thinkers of today.
[+] [-] tluyben2|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] skadamat|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LeicesterCity|9 years ago|reply
Previously you've mentioned the "Oxbridge approach" to reading, whereby--if my recollection is correct--you take four topics and delve into them as much as possible. Could you elaborate on this approach (I've searched the internet, couldn't find anything)? And do you think this structured approach has more benefits than, say, a non-structured approach of reading whatever of interest?
Thanks for your time and generosity, Alan!
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
So I think we have to put something more than randomness and following links to use here. (You can spend a lot of time learning about a big system like Linux without hitting many of the most important ideas in computing -- so we have to heed the "Art is long and Life is short" idea.
Part of the "Oxbridge" process is to have a "reader" (a person who helps you choose what to look at), and these people are worth their weight in gold ...
[+] [-] EdwardCoffin|9 years ago|reply
In a very different approach, most music and sports learning only has contact with a one on one expert once or twice a week, lots of individual practice, group experiences where “playing” is done, and many years of effort. This works because most learners really have difficulty absorb ing hours of expert instruction every week that may or may not fit their capacities, styles, or rhythms. They are generally much better off spending a few hours every day learning on their own and seeing the expert for assessment and advice and play a few times a week.
A few universities use a process like this for academics—sometimes called the “tutorial system”, they include Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the UK.
[1] http://www.vpri.org/pdf/future_of_reading.pdf
[+] [-] edwintorok|9 years ago|reply
- Is there a project that is the continuation of the STEPS project?
- What is your opinion of the Elm language?
- How do you envision all the good research from the STEPS model could be used for building practical systems?
- STEPS focused on personal computing, do you have a vision on how something similar could be done for server-side programming?
- Where can I find all the source code for the Frank system and the DSLs described in the STEPS report?
[+] [-] e12e|9 years ago|reply
The VPRI reports, and before that some of the papers on Croquet (especially the idea of "teatime" which might be described as event-driven, log-based, relative time with eventual data/world-consistency) are fascinating, and I'm grateful for them being published. Also the Ometa-stuff[o] is fascinating (if anything, I think it's gotten too little mind-share).
It seems to me, that we've evolved a bit, in the sense that some things that used to be considered programming (display a text string on screen), no longer is (type it into notepad.exe) -- it's considered "using a computer". At the same time some things that were considered somewhat esoteric is becoming mainstream: perhaps most importantly the growing (resurging?) trend that programming really is meta-programming and language creation.
ReactJS is a mainstream programming model, that fuses html, css, javascript and a at least one templating language - and in a similar vein we see a great adoption in "transpiled" languages, such as coffee script, typescript, clojurescript and more. HN runs on top of Ark, which is a lisp that's been bent hard in the direction of http/html. I see this as a bit of an evolution from when the most common DSLs people were writing for themselves were ORMs - mapping some host language to SQL.
In your time with VPRI - did you find other new patterns or principles for meta-programming and (micro) language design that you think could/should be put to use right now?
Other than the web-developers tendency to reinvent m4 at every turn, in order to program html, css and js at a "higher" level, and the before-mentioned ORM-trends -- the only somewhat mainstream system I am aware of that has a good toolkit for building "real" DSLs, is Racket Scheme (Which shows if one contrasts something like Sphinx, which is a fine system, with Racket's scribble[2]).
Do you think we'll continue to see a rise of meta-programming and language design as more and more tools become available, and it becomes more and more natural to do "real" parsing rather than ad-hoc munging of plain text?
[o] https://github.com/alexwarth/ometa-js
[s] https://docs.racket-lang.org/scribble/getting-started.html
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4017
[+] [-] coldtea|9 years ago|reply
On the "worse is better" divide I've always considered you as someone standing near the "better" (MIT) approach, but with an understanding of the pragmatics inherent in the "worse is better" (New Jersey) approach too.
What is your actual position on the "worse is better" dichotomy?
Do you believe it is real, and if so, can there be a third alternative that combines elements from both sides?
And if not, are we always doomed (due to market forces, programming as "popular culture" etc) to have sub-par tools from what can be theoretically achieved?
[+] [-] alankay1|9 years ago|reply
The real question is "does a hack reset 'normal'?" For most people it tends to, and this makes it very difficult for them to think about the actual issues.
A quote I made up some years ago is "Better and Perfect are the enemies of What-Is-Actually-Needed". The big sin so many people commit in computing is not really paying attention to "What-Is-Actually-Needed"! And not going below that.
[+] [-] jarmitage|9 years ago|reply
What advice would you give to those who don't have a HARC to call their own? what would you do to get set up/a community/funding for your adventure if you were starting out today? What advice do you have for those who are currently in an industrial/academic institution who seek the true intellectual freedom you have found? Is it just luck?!
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
Part of the deal is being really stubborn about what you want to do -- for example, I've never tried to make money from my ideas (because then you are in a very different kind of process -- and this process is not at all good for the kinds of things I try to do).
Every once in a while one runs into "large minded people" like Sam Altman and Vishal Sikka, who do have access to funding that is unfettered enough to lead to really new ideas.
[+] [-] nnq|9 years ago|reply
Why do you think there is always a difference between:
A. the people who know best how something should be done, and
B. the people who end up doing it in a practical and economically-successful or popular way?
And should we educate our children or develop our businesses in ways that could encourage both practicality and invention? (do you think it's possible?). Or would the two tendencies cancel each other out and you'll end up with mediocre children and underperforming businesses, so the right thing to do is to pick one side and develop it at the expense of the other?
(The "two camps" are clearly obvious in the space of programming language design and UI design (imho it's the same thing: programming languages are just "UIs between programmers and machines"), as you well know and said, with one group of people (you among them) having the right ideas of what OOP and UIs should be like, and one people inventing the technologies with success in industry like C++ and Java. But the pattern is happening at all levels, even business: the people with the best business ideas are almost never the ones who end up doing things and so things get done in a "partially wrong" way most of the time, although we have the information to "do it right".)
[+] [-] germinalphrase|9 years ago|reply
As a high school teacher, I often find that discussions of technology in education diminish 'education' to curricular and assessment documentation and planning; however, these artifacts are only a small element of what is, fundamentally, a social process of discussion and progressive knowledge building.
If the real work and progress with my students comes from our intellectual both-and-forth (rather than static documentation of pre-exhibiting knowledge), are there tools I can look to that have been/will be created to empower and enrich this kind of in situ interaction?
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
Let me just say that it's worth trying to understand what might be a "really good" balance between traditional oral culture learning and thinking, what literacy brings to the party, especially via mass media, and what the computer and pervasive networking should bring as real positive additions.
One way to assess what is going on now is partly a retreat from real literacy back to oral modes of communication and oral modes of thought (i.e. "texting" is really a transliteration of an oral utterance, not a literary form).
This is a disaster.
However, even autodidacts really need some oral discussions, and this is one reason to have a "school experience".
The question is balance. Fluent readers can read many times faster than oral transmissions, and there are many more resources at hand. This means in the 21st century that most people should be doing a lot of reading -- especially students (much much more reading than talking). Responsible adults, especially teachers and parents, should be making all out efforts to help this to happen.
For the last point, I'd recommend perusing Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", and this will be a good basis for thinking about tradeoffs between actual interactions (whether with people or computers) and "pondering".
I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs....
[+] [-] alankay1|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msutherl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stcredzero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] projectramo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsprogrammer|9 years ago|reply
Most things around here are not how they should seem.
[+] [-] testmonkey|9 years ago|reply
Who are "humanistic technologists" you admire? Critics, artists, experimenters, even trolls... Which especially creative technologists inspire you?
I imagine people like Jonathan Harris, Ze Frank, Jaron Lanier, Ben Huh, danah boyd, Sherry Turkle, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Rushkoff, etc....
[+] [-] nostrademons|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
(a) Intel and Motorola, etc. getting really interested in the Parc HW architectures that allowed Very High Level Languages to be efficiently implemented. Not having this in the 80s brought "not very good ideas from the 50s and 60s" back into programming, and was one of the big factors in:
(b) the huge propensity of "we know how to program" etc., that was the other big factor preventing the best software practices from the 70s from being the start of much better programming, operating systems, etc. in the 1980s, rather the reversion to weak methods (from which we really haven't recovered).
(c) The use of "best ideas about destiny of computing" e.g. in the ARPA community, rather than weak gestures e.g. the really poorly conceived WWW vs the really important and needed ideas of Engelbart.
[+] [-] discreteevent|9 years ago|reply
A lot of the VPRI work involved inventing new languages (DSLs). The results were extremely impressive but there were some extremely impressive people inventing the languages. Do you think this is a practical approach for everyday programmers? You have also recommended before that there should be clear separation between meta model and model. Should there be something similar to discipline a codebase where people are inventing their own languages? Or should just e.g. OS writers invent the languages and everyone else use a lingua franca?
[+] [-] wdanilo|9 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] alankay|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvikmanis|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fchopin|9 years ago|reply
Like many here, I'm a big fan of what you've accomplished in life, and we all owe you a great debt for the great designs and features of technologies we use everyday!
The majority of us have not accomplished as much in technology, and many of us, though a minority, are in the top end of the age bell curve. I'm in that top end.
I've found over the years that I've gone from being frustrated with the churn of software/web development, to completely apathetic about it, to wanting something else- something more meaningful, and then to somewhat of an acceptance that I'm lucky just to be employed and making what I do as an older developer.
I find it very difficult to have the time and energy to focus on new technologies that come out all of the time, and less and less able as my brain perhaps is less plastic to really get into the latest JavaScript framework, etc.
I don't get excited anymore, don't have the motivation, ability, or time to keep up with things like the younger folk. Also, I've even gotten tired of mentoring them, especially as I become less able and therefore less respected.
Have you ever had or known someone that had similar feelings of futility or a serious slowdown in their career? If so, what worked/what didn't and what advice could you provide?
Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to everyone you have here. It definitely is much appreciated!
[+] [-] fogus|9 years ago|reply
What are the best books relevant to programming that have nothing to do with programming? (e.g. How Buildings Learn, Living Systems, etc.)?
[+] [-] alankay1|9 years ago|reply
Molecular Biology of the Cell
Notes on a Synthesis of Form
etc
[+] [-] dmix|9 years ago|reply