Thanks Julian, Here's another oldie about the "romance of paper" ...http://www.vpri.org/pdf/authoring.pdf
I think it was a forword I wrote for a book (one of Mark Guzdial's?) Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: Julian Leviston <[email protected]> To: Fundamentals of New Computing <[email protected]> Cc: [email protected] Sent: Wed, June 23, 2010 8:07:54 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] Ancient rumblings about objects, actors, and agents You're inspiring, Alan. Words aren't such a good communication means, here, but I'll do my best. Your writing in this article reminds me of how wonderful the world is, and how we're not even just beginning out in terms of possibility (and this brings me so much energy). It reminds me of my habit of loving blank books and blank paper when I was a kid. So much potential! Amazing! Needless to say, I was considered an incredibly strange kid by other kids. An ordinary child would surely only notice a "piece of paper" - solid form, not pure potentiality - recognised, not seen. The capacity to appreciate the infinite potential, so obvious with children, is often forgotten by adults. I'm always so happy to read your works (and the works of those who surround you), because it's so evident you haven't forgotten it, that you've got a direct link to it, and are reminded by it in every moment. It brings me a huge amount of happiness just to know that there are people like you in the world. Julian. On 24/06/2010, at 5:06 AM, Alan Kay wrote: For the amusement of the list. > >.....Actually only semi-ancient. > > >Here's a Scientific American article I was asked to write about computer >software in 1984.http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr1984001_comp_soft.pdf > >There are a few hidden jokes along the way. > >The stuff that is relevant to some of the current discussions is put to the >general reader at the end of the page marked "6" (the 4th actual page). I used >the just starting to be familiar idea of spreadsheets to explain the idea of >"zillions of concurrent reactive agents" acting like tissues of cells (blood >is also a tissue) to make very large systems. > >(The examples were actually done in the earliest versions of Excel that MS >originally prototyped on the Mac with many phone calls up there to try to get >them to understand what they should really be doing with spreadsheets. Xerox >had already done a secret deep generalization of spreadsheets in Smalltalk for >the CIA -- implemented on PARC workstations -- and it was a bit of a challenge >to keep straight was was supposed to be kept secret ....) > >Some of these ideas were fueled by previous work at CMU and elsewhere on >"forward (eager)" inferencing systems, by some of Ehud Shapiro's thoughts in >83 about what a Concurrent Prolog might be like (answer: much nicer than >Prolog!), by the first few notes about Linda, and by some work I did at the >end of the 70s and early 80s about trying to "just retrieve" rather than >sending messages ("pulling" rather than "pushing"). > >Cheers, > >Alan > > > > >_______________________________________________ >fonc mailing list >[email protected] >http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
