Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

[boxfire]

The idea of computing as the shared stage to reflect our own intelligence is really what sticks out to me as the best way to frame what interacting with a computer means. It's not new but Alan did a great job of motivating and framing it here. Thanks for posting this great reminder that what we use as computers today are still only poor imitations of what could truly be done if we can transport our minds to be more directly players on that stage. It's interesting to reflect the other way as well. If we are the actors reflecting a computer to itself. An AGI has to imagine and reflect in a space created of our ideas. To be native the AI needs better tools, the "mouse" of it's body controlling the closed loop of it's "graphics", how do we create such a space that is more directly shared? Dynamically trading been actor and audience in an improvisational exchange? This is the human computer symbiosis I seek.

[d_tr]

A first-class programming language (not an LLM) to talk to the computer's OS along with a rich library is the most important missing component IMO.

Humans communicate mainly with language and no OS provides this in a satisfactory way for the average user.

The result is users mostly clicking on signs to choose among predetermined tasks, like monkeys in a lab.

[coldtea]

>The idea of computing as the shared stage to reflect our own intelligence

We tried that, and it worked briefly. But the end result is the modern web/app landscape: commercialization, tits and cats, hating, techo-feudal and government control, partisanship bs, spam, narcisism - and rare sprinkles of intelligence here and there.

[djmips]

I feel like the LLM interface will enable that. I wonder what Alan Kay makes of the current LLM revolution (he does talk a bit about it in the question section @ around 1:35)

[nomilk]

I heard of Alan Kay via Steve Jobs's intro of the iPhone [1], but otherwise know little about him - can anyone recommend other Alan Kay talks/essays/books?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQKMoT-6XSg&t=10m2s

[mpweiher]

The Computer Revolution hasn't happened yet, OOPSLA 1997 keynote

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY

Others have already mentioned The Early History of Smalltalk, highly recommended. You'll probably want to read it a couple of times, revisit from time to time.

The big idea is messaging, or rather "ma"

http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1998-...

"The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be."

"I think I recall also pointing out that it is vitally important not just to have a complete metasystem, but to have fences that help guard the crossing of metaboundaries."

" I would say that a system that allowed other metathings to be done in the ordinary course of programming (like changing what inheritance means, or what is an instance) is a bad design. (I believe that systems should allow these things, but the design should be such that there are clear fences that have to be crossed when serious extensions are made.)"

"I would suggest that more progress could be made if the smart and talented Squeak list would think more about what the next step in metaprogramming should be -- how can we get great power, parsimony, AND security of meaning?"

[e12e]

From the sibling link, I'd highlight:

Alan Kay: A powerful idea about teaching ideas at TED (2007) https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Alan_Kay:_A_powerful_idea...

Alan Kay: Normal Considered Harmful (2009) https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Alan_Kay:_Normal_Consider...

Back to the Future of Software Development (2003) https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Back_to_the_Future_of_Sof...

All of the STEPS reports - I especially like appendix E in:

https://tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/tr2007008_steps.pdf

> Appendix E: Extended Example: A Tiny TCP/IP Done as a Parser (by Ian Piumarta)

> Our first task is to describe the format of network packets. Perfectly good descriptions already exist in the various IETF Requests For Comments (RFCs) in the form of "ASCII-art diagrams". This form was probably chosen because the structure of a packet is immediately obvious just from glancing at the pictogram.

> If we teach our programming language to recognize pictograms as definitions of accessors for bit fields within structures, our program is the clearest of its own meaning. The following expression cre- ates an IS grammar that describes ASCII art diagrams.

> (...) We can now define accessors for the fields of an IP packet header simply by drawing its structure.

[djmips]

Can't specifically recommend a talk but here's a menu of Kay talks.

https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

[vhiremath4]

Highly recommend his talk on the power of simplicity. This was one of those lightbulb moments for me when I was a younger programmer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs

[derekenos]

My favorite:

Is it really "Complex"? Or did we just make it "Complicated"? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY

If you're interested in kids + computers + education, this 1955 Technology in Education House Committee Meeting is a surprisingly great watch, and has Kay alongside Seymour Papert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwsQn1Rs-4A

[ProllyInfamous]

Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC

This follows Alan Kay (as well as dozens of others) through their groundbreaking research at Xerox's research lab in Palo Alto, primarily during the 70s.

You will learn how these visionaries and personalities were largely at war with themselves, while HQ (2,000 miles away) largely ignored any of their marvelous outputs... until it was too late.

----

I just checked this morning, and was shocked to see that XRX's total market cap is "only" $2B, when they could have been Apple computer [today ~$2,600B].

An interesting tidbit that many don't know about the Xerox/Apple relationship was that Steve Jobs was allowed into the facility, on two separate tours, because he offered Xerox preferred stock in the then-upcoming Apple IPO — which they then held on to for less than a few years.

[justin66]

He actively answers questions on Quora and those answers come in a format (short length - though his are unusually well thought out - and narrow focus) that is easy to browse.

[6510]

The funniest to me was when he was 5 he read about 150 books: "I hit first grade, and I already knew the teachers were lying to me"

[el_memorioso]

Alan Kay won the Turing Award in 2003 for, "For pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing." His Dynabook [1], developed during the 70s, is the predecessor of modern tablets and laptops.

[Rochus]

https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

[blessedonekobo]

This probably my favorite because it was mostly unscripted

Alan Kay : July 2007 : A Conversation with CMU Faculty & Students

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFc379hu--8

[lawrenceyan]

Wow, this guy Vannevar Bush was the definition of being early:

> Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified.

[sp332]

Actually I still don't know of a good way to make a path along several links and share that path with someone else later.

[javier_e06]

Thank you for the story.

My take away is the the concept that GUIs Mirror our minds as individuals the way good writing and theater does. I then ponder about what could be a fair or useful representation of a collective mind in a way an individual mind can process/work-with?

Maybe that is the will be the metaverse(snowcrash).

Thanks again.

[AlchemistCamp]

It's sad to see that despite Alan Kay's lamentations, not a single comment mentions Doug Englebart or the fireflies to be found.

Especially on a forum for a startup accelerator, it seems like that should have been the most intriguing part of the talk.

[kragen]

i'm not quite sure what he meant by the fireflies, but i did comment a bit on work (largely led by kay) on, in a significant sense, continuing engelbart's efforts, and on interesting new areas to explore https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39618408 and on interesting new things in formal methods in particular: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39622073

[skadamat]

I wish we had a popular operating system for end users like ourselves that was “live” all the way down.

It’s unfortunate we’ve been stuck with Windows, Mac, and Linux only

[linguae]

I have the same dream. A part of me wishes Richard Stallman set out on making a Lisp OS instead of making a Unix clone, but this was the mid-1980s and thus I understand the technical limitations and the social environment of the time. The 1990s could’ve been a better time; workstations and commodity PCs were powerful enough to run an entire Lisp or Smalltalk operating system, and there would’ve been substantial interest in such a system. Imagine had we ended up with a free, open source Lisp or Smalltalk OS running on the Pentium and PowerPC machines of the era as an alternative to Linux and the BSDs. I think this would’ve been an easier foundation to develop a FOSS desktop instead of the X11/KDE/GNOME/Wayland situation we have today.

But the dream isn’t dead. If only I had more free time…

[timrowledge]

I worked at Interval Research (yet another Palo Alto lab) in the mid/late 90s on a large project (and if it had completed and worked out, would have led to a proper IoT without the crap, maybe) in which we use Smalltalk all the way down to the custom hardware. A few hundred lines of C and assembler tucked away in a corner, but interrupts and processes were all handled in Smalltalk.

It was fun. It could have been great.

[wslh]

People are different, that is why flame wars like Emacs vs. Vi still exists. It is incredible that we tend to assume that there ahould be just one technical response to problems.

[melvinroest]

One could repurpose Pharo for this, I think. I'm not entirely sure how the environment would be an "at the OS level thing" but it should be doable to have a basic OS that basically boots a Pharo environment and then that's your OS.

[nanna]

Live in what sense?

To me Emacs fits the bill, or at least a subset thereof.

[nanna]

Wonderful as ever.

Kay demonstrates an emulator of Sketchpad. Anyone know if it's been shared anywhere?

[asolove]

Also very curious about this. I’ve been slowly building one myself and would happily give up if another good one already exists. Tried searching the web and can’t find it.

[cxr]

Source code: <https://github.com/alexwarth/sutherland>

Demo: <https://alexwarth.github.io/sutherland/>

[ohshima]

The demo itself is a video of this: https://youtu.be/Vt8jyPqsmxE?t=750 which is a simulation done in the Frank system in the STEPS project.

[signalToNose]

Ivan Sutherlands sketch pad paper is here: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/14979

[uprun]

I have watched huge number of his talks, and unfortunatelly he did not say something new in this one ..

[Sophistifunk]

The audio gating on this makes it incredibly difficult to watch

[angiosperm]

There are sound reasons why no substantial system in common use is coded in Smalltalk. Kay could have spent the decades since his time at PARC figuring out why, and remedying them.

One of the reasons is that O-O is just one of several important ways discovered to organize software. Any big enough problem will have places for each. Specialization is for insects.

[pjmlp]

The reason is called Java, and having all key Smalltalk vendors pivoting into Java.

Smalltalk was the ".NET" of OS/2, and Visual Age for Smalltalk code browser still lives on Eclipse.

Then there are those Objective-C and Ruby developers still around, heavily influenced from Smalltalk.

[kragen]

you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did some substantial research into some of the other important ways to organize software, including things like array languages, david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and cooperating communities of specialized solvers. in this talk, he also mentioned gelernter's tuple-space architecture, though you may have missed it. he definitely isn't arguing that oo should be the universal way to build everything, much less smalltalk; he's lamenting that no better paradigm than their research prototype has emerged since then

however, i do agree that there are some advances made since then that he doesn't fully appreciate, things like the importance of free-software licensing, roy fielding's work on architectural styles, recent advances in formal methods and functional programming, and the web's principle of least power

[igouy]

"Rudolph Technologies Helps Semiconductor Customers Reach Market Faster with Smalltalk-Based ControlWORKS"

https://www.cincom.com/pdf/CS050418-1.pdf

Someone suggested Smalltalk a million lines long which I have no way to confirm or contradict ;-)

[lproven]

> There are sound reasons why no substantial system in common use is coded in Smalltalk.

Points in the direction of...

https://newspeaklanguage.org/

https://bracha.org/Site/Newspeak.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak_(programming_language...