Hacker News Reader

Comment by layer8 | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough. But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work. He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo.

View on HN

>But Alan Kay doesn’t say “use Erlang”, nor does he go into any depths about what the desirable feature set is and what would make it work or would fail to make it work.

Oh yeah? Then how do you explain this lecture where he says explicitly that Erlang should be the modern programmer's assembly?

https://youtu.be/fhOHn9TClXY

In my experience, people who criticize Kay for being too vague or kvetching too pointlessly or lacking practical experience in computer science today almost always have not bothered to familiarize themselves with the vast majority of his work before deciding their opinion on it. It's hard to disagree with him that this makes us more like a pop culture than a profession after seeing it.

You hit the nail head on. The field of IT is a pop culture and consequently just as prone to fads and periodic fashions.

If only. Unix would be dead and buried many years ago if it was just a fad. It's far more like the old repeating fertility rituals of many paganistic societies, where your neighbors burn your pagus down to cleanse the village of the spite of the undead grain god if you plowed your heath in a different direction from everyone else.

Just adding here that the understanding of the forces at play in a cultural war makes what you just said even more clear and for a vast spectrum of fields way beyond IT.

It's somewhat of a backhanded compliment though -- calling Erlang a "modern assembly" is like the quip that C is a "portable assembler" -- that is, a tool useful for low-level stuff but which you should mostly use to implement higher level languages on top of.

I don't agree with this in the context of the full video. I'd encourage you to watch it; it's quite good. It's clear Armstrong and Kay have a great deal of respect for each other.

> He’s always just waxing around nebulous desiderata and complaining about the status quo.

How is inventing Smalltalk and putting his ideas into reality just "waxing around" or "complaining"?

Maybe because there is no one/right/simple answer. You really have to think for yourself and seek out answers instead of expecting them. You're doing that now but with the mistaken impression you were to be handed them.

If he said "use Erlang" then that eliminates the actual message he's trying to convey, which is message passing is good.

I bet if he simply said "use Erlang", 99% of headlines and discussion would be "Alan Kay said Erlang is the greatest language evah!"

I do appreciate that he respects his audience, ie me, enough that he thinks we can read "message passing is good" and go from there to choosing a message passing language that is suitable for our needs, or even using a non message passing language due to other factors, but recognizing that OOP is about message passing and not state encapsulation, which would impact how I code even in Java.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com