5 ms·

> Bret Victor is very much Alan Kay's protege and has unfortunately inherited the curse of people cherry-picking particular ideas and missing the bigger picture

> Bret Victor is very much Alan Kay's protege and has unfortunately inherited the curse of people cherry-picking particular ideas and missing the bigger picture. Maybe it's time we lay some of the blame for us idiots just not getting Alan Kay's ideas on Alan Kay. At this point he only has himself to blame if he's spent 50 years trying and failing to communicate his wonderful ideas.

Ygg2 4y ago
Alan Kay is the Tesla of programming. Beautiful design, genius implementation but utterly impractical in 90% cases.
pavlov 4y ago
Honest question: who in this field has a better track record of their visionary ideas leading to real-world implementations than Alan Kay? Not everything ended up being adopted in the form he envisioned or with the semantics he proposed, but there have been a lot of right calls and influential designs in his 50+ year career.
- davidy123 4y ago
  Douglas Engelbart. Tim Berners-Lee. Smalltalk is pretty cool, though.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    What kind of impact did Engelbart have after "the mother of all demos"? Much more limited than Kay, IMO. Kay’s Dynabook is arguably just as important, and he went on to do a lot of other stuff. Same for Berners-Lee. Sure, he remains influential over the web's incremental progress on W3C, but anything more visionary seems to be a miss: XHTML, semantic web, the Solid project...
    - liveoneggs 4y ago
      The mother of all demos is the world we live in now. He demonstrated a working model of 30 years into the future. It's like someone walking on stage and showing you what life will be in 2050. Engelbart invented the mouse and the entire idea of pointing at things on the screen to interact with them. The results of that interaction is now what you call "the web" (hypertext).
      - davidy123 4y ago
        Englebart also substantially inspired Kay, but each of these people would probably have not had success without the network of ispirations. In fact I think we should talk about it like this; Bush->Englebart->Kay->Berners-Lee (superficially) rather than the individual on their own. It's also interesting that none of these people were at the head of big successful companies, though not surprising since that basically involves a lot of compromises.
        liveoneggs 4y ago
        I agree entirely with you but had a hard time ignoring the "yeah but what have you done for me lately?" tone above
        davidy123 4y ago
        Oh I'm with you. And I think (and hope) TBL isn't finished yet.
pas 4y ago
I think his experiment with DSLs (VPRI STEPS project) is very insightful, I always herpderp about how we need better tools to in situ express "the domain", but of course reality has a very strong bias for keeping apparent complexity down, keeping cognitive friction between components minimal, leaky abstractions are bad so encapsulation has to be total, so it's extra hard as an afterthought (hence ORMs and middlewares tend to be very clunky), etc. Though there are a few examples of moving in the right (?) direction, for example styled components (for React, which moves CSS into JS/TS code, there's a VScode plugin for it, and thanks to the tagged templates they can be validated).
- m_mueller 4y ago
  I remember seeing a demo where A.K. used an experimental OS made with ~1k LOC using STEPS approach to actually run his slides. Never found the link to it again (if someone has it I'd appreciate), but even more importantly, I'd love to know what happened with that OS. It would seem like a great research OS going forward if it really had GUI, networking and FS expressed with such low amount of user code. It also seems to me the project coming closest to Engelbart's vision (as their NLS also did everything just by meta-programming to an assembler with increasingly high levels of abstraction).
  - morphle 4y ago
    Alan Kay addresses Qualcomm https://vimeo.com/82301919 https://vimeo.com/82301919
    - m_mueller 4y ago
      Thank you! Is he actually running their own OS here, or is it just a scripted slide application? What I saw was more of a smaller talk given to students if I remember correctly, where he goes into the technical details of his setup a bit.
      - morphle 4y ago
        Please see the comments on this Morphle HN account for those Alan Kay talks or mail morphle &at& ziggo &dot& nl for all those Alan Kay links student lectures you remember.
1123581321 4y ago
He hasn't failed at all. What are you talking about? Dozens of programming languages are more sensible and ergonomic because of his influence.

Ygg2 4y ago

Alan Kay is the Tesla of programming. Beautiful design, genius implementation but utterly impractical in 90% cases.

pavlov 4y ago

Honest question: who in this field has a better track record of their visionary ideas leading to real-world implementations than Alan Kay? Not everything ended up being adopted in the form he envisioned or with the semantics he proposed, but there have been a lot of right calls and influential designs in his 50+ year career.

davidy123 4y ago
Douglas Engelbart. Tim Berners-Lee. Smalltalk is pretty cool, though.
- pavlov 4y ago
  What kind of impact did Engelbart have after "the mother of all demos"? Much more limited than Kay, IMO. Kay’s Dynabook is arguably just as important, and he went on to do a lot of other stuff. Same for Berners-Lee. Sure, he remains influential over the web's incremental progress on W3C, but anything more visionary seems to be a miss: XHTML, semantic web, the Solid project...
  - liveoneggs 4y ago
    The mother of all demos is the world we live in now. He demonstrated a working model of 30 years into the future. It's like someone walking on stage and showing you what life will be in 2050. Engelbart invented the mouse and the entire idea of pointing at things on the screen to interact with them. The results of that interaction is now what you call "the web" (hypertext).
    - davidy123 4y ago
      Englebart also substantially inspired Kay, but each of these people would probably have not had success without the network of ispirations. In fact I think we should talk about it like this; Bush->Englebart->Kay->Berners-Lee (superficially) rather than the individual on their own. It's also interesting that none of these people were at the head of big successful companies, though not surprising since that basically involves a lot of compromises.
      - liveoneggs 4y ago
        I agree entirely with you but had a hard time ignoring the "yeah but what have you done for me lately?" tone above
        davidy123 4y ago
        Oh I'm with you. And I think (and hope) TBL isn't finished yet.

pas 4y ago

I think his experiment with DSLs (VPRI STEPS project) is very insightful, I always herpderp about how we need better tools to in situ express "the domain", but of course reality has a very strong bias for keeping apparent complexity down, keeping cognitive friction between components minimal, leaky abstractions are bad so encapsulation has to be total, so it's extra hard as an afterthought (hence ORMs and middlewares tend to be very clunky), etc. Though there are a few examples of moving in the right (?) direction, for example styled components (for React, which moves CSS into JS/TS code, there's a VScode plugin for it, and thanks to the tagged templates they can be validated).

m_mueller 4y ago
I remember seeing a demo where A.K. used an experimental OS made with ~1k LOC using STEPS approach to actually run his slides. Never found the link to it again (if someone has it I'd appreciate), but even more importantly, I'd love to know what happened with that OS. It would seem like a great research OS going forward if it really had GUI, networking and FS expressed with such low amount of user code. It also seems to me the project coming closest to Engelbart's vision (as their NLS also did everything just by meta-programming to an assembler with increasingly high levels of abstraction).
- morphle 4y ago
  Alan Kay addresses Qualcomm https://vimeo.com/82301919 https://vimeo.com/82301919
  - m_mueller 4y ago
    Thank you! Is he actually running their own OS here, or is it just a scripted slide application? What I saw was more of a smaller talk given to students if I remember correctly, where he goes into the technical details of his setup a bit.
    - morphle 4y ago
      Please see the comments on this Morphle HN account for those Alan Kay talks or mail morphle &at& ziggo &dot& nl for all those Alan Kay links student lectures you remember.

1123581321 4y ago

He hasn't failed at all. What are you talking about? Dozens of programming languages are more sensible and ergonomic because of his influence.