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Comment by 0xpgm | Hacker News Reader

Reminded me of this thread between Alan Kay and Rich Hickey where Alan Kay thinks "data" is a bad idea.

My interpretation of his point of view is that what you need is a process/interpreter/live object that 'explains' the data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11945722

EDIT: He writes more about it in Quora. In brief, he says it is 'meaning', not 'data' that is central to programming.

https://qr.ae/pCVB9m

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Thanks for the pointer to this 2016 dialog!

One part of it has interesting new resonance in the era of agentic LLMs:

alankay on June 21, 2016 | root | parent | next [–]

This is why "the objects of the future" have to be ambassadors that can negotiate with other objects they've never seen. Think about this as one of the consequences of massive scaling ...

Nowdays rather than the methods associated with data objects, we are dealing with "context" and "prompts".

Quite a nice insight there!

I should probably be thinking more in this direction.

Hm, not sure. Data on its own (say, a string of numbers) might be meaningless - but structured data? Sure, there may be ambiguity but well-structured data generally ought to have a clear/obvious interpretation. This is the whole idea of nailing your data structures.

Yeah, structured data implies some processing on raw data to improve its meaning. Alan Kay seems to want to push this idea to encapsulate data with rich behaviour.

I’m with Rich Hickey on this one, though I generally prefer my data be statically typed.

Sure, static typing adds some sort of process that provides a coarse interpretation of the data.

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