Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Alan Kay: The PC Must Be Revamped (2007)

cioinsight.com

27 pointsRadix7 comments

I know he's famous, but I really like this guy. He says interesting things like this:

"Basically, the reason I work with children and not adults is because adults are famously difficult to change in any significant way. They've made a commitment to the norms of the world they live in. Children are born not knowing what culture they've been born into, how the culture thinks, and what that culture thinks is important. Yet they are born with some built-in patterns of thinking that are universal. Since the late sixties, I've been interested in the extent to which you could cultivate the kind of thinking skills that only a few people use in the world today, by getting children to learn much more widely and much more fluently than most adults have. If you want to make a change, get the children to think differently."

It's analogous to the immune response. Of course adults are going to be resistant to ideas that are a total mind-$%^#! If something does not fit in with your foundation model of reality, then it's likely an exploit meme. (Like, "We are the messengers of the supreme being. You must convince others of this, and also give us 10% of your earnings!")

This poses a special problem for the transmission of things like values -- some of which are not exploit-memes but actually valuable heuristics for mutual benefit. (Like honesty and fairness.) Since the contexts that preoccupy the mainstream of each generation change so dramatically now, the lack of common context impedes the demonstration of values by an older generation to a younger one. Several centuries ago, it would be commonplace to find 3 generations on the same dance floor, all having fun dancing to the same music. Now, this is considered to be a ridiculous situation.

This change is so rapid now, that you see generational rifts in recent pop phenomena like Anime fandom. A friend of mine who was an MC at some of the early Anime Expos got trashed online by some kid over some bit of web forum etiquette. I'm sorry, but someone that connected with the history of your scene deserves a little patience and an explanation. (I'm sure others have similar anecdotes from Hip-Hop or skateboarding. Heck, there should be plenty of programming related anecdotes similar to this.)

It should be interesting to analyze how his own resistance influences him and his ideas.

My friend the ex-Anime Expo MC or Alan Kay?

Alan Kay, of course.

Some very cool ideas there. The article struck a chord on "people don't want to learn to use their computers": especially, they put a high premium on interchangeability. Examples: people asking to borrow my computer but recoiling from "a linux", me not wanting to switch to xmonad because I can't use it on lab computers.

I think personally I'm going to make an effort to learn some more of the command line instead of using Ubuntu's GUI tools for config.

> not wanting to switch to xmonad ...

I become less reluctant after installing a time tracker and finding that I spend >45 minutes a day looking for or moving windows. It only took an hour to install and learn.

Leads me to wonder if there are similar inefficiencies in the rest of my work. Has anyone tried tracking similar statistics for things like features implemented or bugs added? There's no end of efficiency advice on HN but I've yet to see anyone take a scientific approach and actually monitor their performance.

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