Alan Kay: The computer revolution hasn't happened yet | Hacker News Reader

Alan Kay: The computer revolution hasn't happened yet

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22 pointshenning11 comments

Does it seem to anybody else that we've actually stagnated instead of moved the field of computing forward during the last 10 years? Sure, machines are faster, we've got more bandwitdth, etc., but we're still "automating" stuff, rather than transcending the "pink plane".

Or, is it just that I've spent too much time at the dayjob, hacking Java together to make the customer happy?

Completely stagnated. In another great quote from Alan Kay he says, "Java and C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS."

I think it was the demand/money. Once the PC revolution hit, there was so much to do just to automate current processes that we got lost in the workload. It doesn't help that our industry is both woefully ignorant of its past and horribly dogmatic about its present.

That said, there are some very good people currently working in this space -- looking for the "pink plane". I'm very optimistic about this area actually.

(I think/hope you meant looking for the "blue plane", unless the reason for looking for the pink one is to see what it is we're trying to transcend.)

I'm curious; who are these people? What are they working on? Can I help?

Yes, I meant the blue plane. (It's an old presentation -- I didn't watch it again -- but an important one.)

The people are: Alan Kay himself, Charles Simonyi, and a company I'm affiliated with called Anemach. They each have very different approaches and we'll just have to wait and see what comes next.

"OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them."... Alan Kay 2003

http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht25Ht/doc_kay...

I thought his style of presentation had much to improve on, but it shed new light on what he intended with smalltalk. Apparently, encapsulation was only really one small part of his whole idea.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78364

I think this particular post sums up his ideas in his presentation. Also, watch it with 1997 in mind. That's why he rails against MS so much.

He always seem so sad and wistful. He always seems to be lamenting things.

But, he's still so influential that he can't be ignored.

It's some indication of the greatness of James Watson that he shows up even in a talk about OO programming.

E pur si muove

Wow, just watched this. Really fascinating talk - especially his points about the wonders of scalable computation in biology and how clunky man-made computation seems in comparison so far. Definitely worth the watch.

Is there a transcription, or an abstract? I haven't got time for video.

It's one of the better talks I've listened to (it's been posted before) and I usually can't sit through such things.

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