alankay1

5 ms·

1.
by alankay1 8y ago
I was disappointed that something better than Smalltalk wasn't on the Mac and iPhone (Smalltalk was truly wonderful in the context of the 70s, but we considered it just a step in a good direction). Not understanding Hypercard was one o
2.
by alankay1 9y ago
Simula can't be praised too highly, and it was a huge influence. But if you take the care to check, you will find out that what I termed "Object Oriented" was quite different from Simula in (what I thought were) important way
3.
by alankay1 9y ago
The 7±2 was thoroughly proven for sequences of numbers, letters, words, etc. by George Miller and followers. Much has been done since, and this shows that for many things we can handle fewer chunks. That "7±2" is still used for th
4.
by alankay1 9y ago
See my comments above. And if you take a look to see what the Alto could really do graphically, and even more so the Dorado, you would not worry about speed. The decisions were for other reasons.
5.
by alankay1 9y ago
See my comment above, including the last paragraph
6.
by alankay1 9y ago
Just to help with a few facts (easy to find for those who care). http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/ Smalltalk started working in 1972, the Alto in 1973, and Smalltalk on it a month or so after the Alto came
7.
by alankay1 9y ago
Brian Silverman, who has done some miraculous "bringing back software to life" (and some HW as well), has always wanted to do this. The problem here is partly that no one is quite sure "which" TX-2 has to be emulated, an
8.
by alankay1 9y ago
The Alto only had 1024 words (4k bytes) of microcode, so it is included in the estimate. The NoteTaker used several 8086s (the first ones) and was entirely in Smalltalk except for 6k bytes of 8086 code. i.e. "math wins"! ... when
9.
by alankay1 9y ago
What he means is that names are a local convention, and scaling soon obliterates the conventions. Then you need to go to descriptions that use a much smaller set of agreed on things (and you can use the "ambassador" idea from the
10.
by alankay1 9y ago
Yes, this got very clear in a hurry even in the ARPAnet days, and later at Parc. (This is part of the Licklider "communicating with aliens" problem.) Note that you could do a little of this in Linda, and quite a bit more in a &quo
11.
by alankay1 9y ago
In 2004 I wrote a tribute to the research community I grew up in "The Power of the Context" ( http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2004001_power.pdf ) and this will possibly help with some of your questions. I was just one
12.
by alankay1 9y ago
1. The definitions are the boundary -- these are what are used to make the interior. The analogy is to definitions (used to be called axioms) in math. Simple for math (because it is only about itself). Difficult for science because we can
13.
by alankay1 9y ago
Yes, it's not the apparent logic in the operations that counts but the choice of definitions (and these include the definitions of the operations). I wrote a paper for the "Mind-Body Conference" in 1975 that discussed this. T
14.
by alankay1 9y ago
Bret is a great thinker and designer
15.
by alankay1 9y ago
When Neil Postman was a grad student he followed Marshall McLuhan around for a few months. One thing he noted was that McLuhan -- when argued with or when asked a question never directly replied, but just came out with another one of his zi
16.
by alankay1 9y ago
I'll avoid trying to reply to this. The Roman poet Juvenal quipped "But who will guard the guardians?" referring to one of the main problems of any republic. Plato had one suggested solution, and the US founders had another.
17.
by alankay1 9y ago
It's an extensible language with a meta system so you can make each and every level of it do what you want. And, as I mentioned, the first version of Smalltalk (-72) did not have a convention to use a selector. The later Smalltalks wou
18.
by alankay1 9y ago
You need to have "things that can answer questions". I'd like to get the "right answer" when I ask a machine for someone's date of birth, and similarly I'd like to get the right answer when I ask for their
19.
by alankay1 9y ago
My perspective is that our planet is small but there are lots of people. "Biology is variation" so there are wide distributions of properties. I like the idea of "Equal Rights" (and also think that it's necessary).
20.
by alankay1 9y ago
Yes, "collections" and other such things in Smalltalk are "the Christian Scientists with appendicitis". Our implementations were definitely compromises between seeing how to be non-imperative vs already having the "
21.
by alankay1 9y ago
Mathematics is a plural for a reason. The idea is to invent ways to represent and infer that are not just effective but help thinking. I don't think Smalltalk is well suited to represent any algebra (the earliest version (-72) was clos
22.
by alankay1 9y ago
A selector is an object -- so that is pure -- and its use is a convention of the messaging, and the message itself is one object, that is an instance of Class message. What's fun is that every Smalltalk contained the tools to make thei
23.
by alankay1 9y ago
A clarifying comment here. When one thinks in terms of what I called objects ca 1966, one is talking about entities that from the outside are identical to what we think of as computers (and this means not just sending messages and getting
24.
by alankay1 9y ago
My goals are a lot bigger than Hoppe's (and I fervently hope for something much better than his vision).
25.
by alankay1 9y ago
Take a look at the how the US responded to WWI re "free speech" etc, and you'll see that we haven't hit bottom yet. But we have fulfilled H.L. Mencken's 1919 prophesy: “As democracy is perfected, the office of presi
26.
by alankay1 9y ago
James Fletcher -- twice the head of NASA -- had a very good speech that "the moon shot, and etc" were really about learning to coordinate 300,000 people and billions of dollars to accomplish something big in a relatively short tim
27.
by alankay1 9y ago
We should get "Fast Company" to interview you -- you'd do a better job! (Actually I think I did do a better job than their editing wound up with.) Your comments and criticism of the NSF are dead-on (and is the reason I gave u
28.
by alankay1 9y ago
Yes, the SICP follows "simulate data" ideas much further back in the past, including the B5000 computer, and especially the OOP systems I did. But the big realization is that there are very few things that are helpful when they ar
29.
by alankay1 9y ago
The Alto didn't get any faster, and there was not a lot of superfast microcode RAM (if we'd had more it would have made a huge difference). In the beginning we just got Smalltalk-72 going in the NOVA emulator. Then we used the mic
30.
by alankay1 9y ago
I should have mentioned a few other things for the later Smalltalks. First, selectors are just objects. Second, you could use the automatic "message not understood" mechanism to field an unrecognized object. I think I'd do th

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