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Comment by huuu | Hacker News Reader

I might be wrong, but I think people like Alan Kay and Christopher Alexander have in common that they:

   * see that things can be done better (not as in upgrade but best);
   * have a global idea/feeling of how this could be done;
   * take a lot of ideas from nature.

And somehow I think they have a lot of trouble expressing the 'how'.

My take: we should take a good look at nature because this is closest to what we are. For example the communication between objects could be learned from cells.

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Maybe they're reluctant to pick "the" how, too soon.

If you're in a field from the early days, you probably have more of a pioneer or explorer mentality. Later come settlers, who pick areas for utility. Even later come residents, born and raised there, most of whom don't really question what is given.

This probably seems weird and frustrating to the explorers -- why settle so soon? Yes it seems comfortable and convenient, here, but there is so much left to explore.

That's how I understand Alan Kay. He doesn't want to sell us some snazzy next big thing. He wants more of us to spend more time imagining and trying new things.

Nothing wrong with looking at nature and trying to get inspiration from it (e.g. neural nets) but ever since we realized that flight was easier to implement with chemical combustion than by flapping wings, we know that just because something works in nature doesn't mean it will be easy to replicate for human use.

True. But because as today it's easier to implement doesn't mean we won't have aircraft with flapping wings in the future.

We probably won't, at least not at human-scale and not on Earth. Flapping wings don't scale; there's a reason you have to get to #12 of the heaviest birds list to get one that flies, at ~13% the maximum mass of the heaviest bird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_birds#Table_of...

I wonder where pterodactyls would fall on that scale.

Looks like Wikipedia has us covered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pterosaur_size#Speculation_abo...

From the references, this is a pretty good read:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-pterosaurs-fir...

Alan was a Molecular Biology major in college and has stated before that the basis for OO messages was originally inspired by cellular communication:

> I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages (so messaging came at the very beginning -- it took a while to see how to do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful).

> communication between objects could be learned from cells

So, message queues? I completely agree.

Does queuing occur when cells communicate?

Sort of. AFAIK, cells basically just send out signals and the nearest available cell with a compatible protein that can "read" the signal picks it up.

That sounds more event-based, no? The cells trigger events, and the compatible proteins are listeners.

Well I asked because lets say queuing does not occur, then you might want to design a system that can send and receive messages in without queue.

Definitely. Designing a system where the order of procedures is not certain would be a very interesting challenge and could be very useful.

...that would be a function call (if synchronous) and a simple event in the asynchronous case.

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