Hi, Very interesting, but:
"[Digression on who, in addition to Cerf, should have won various computing prizes...]" I guess that's not the best editing job ever, I for one would like to hear the digression, and if they edit it out mentioning it at all is a bit irritating... It would be interesting to hear more details about that Bob Barton class, too. Cheers, Jarosław Rzeszótko 2012/11/16 Eugen Leitl <[email protected]> > > > http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442# > > Interview with Alan Kay > > By Andrew Binstock, July 10, 2012 > > The pioneer of object-orientation, co-designer of Smalltalk, and UI > luminary > opines on programming, browsers, objects, the illusion of patterns, and how > Socrates could still make it to heaven. > > In June of this year, the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) > celebrated > the centenary of Alan Turing's birth by holding a conference with > presentations by more than 30 Turing Award winners. The conference was > filled > with unusual lectures and panels (videos are available here) both about > Turing and present-day computing. During a break in the proceedings, I > interviewed Alan Kay -- a Turing Award recipient known for many innovations > and his articulated belief that the best way to predict the future is to > invent it. > > [A side note: Re-creating Kay's answers to interview questions was > particularly difficult. Rather than the linear explanation in response to > an > interview question, his answers were more of a cavalcade of topics, > tangents, > and tales threaded together, sometimes quite loosely -- always rich, and > frequently punctuated by strong opinions. The text that follows attempts to > create somewhat more linearity to the content. -- ALB] > > Childhood As A Prodigy > > Binstock: Let me start by asking you about a famous story. It states that > you'd read more than 100 books by the time you went to first grade. This > reading enabled you to realize that your teachers were frequently lying to > you. > > Kay: Yes, that story came out in a commemorative essay I was asked to > write. > > Binstock: So you're sitting there in first grade, and you're realizing that > teachers are lying to you. Was that transformative? Did you all of a sudden > view the whole world as populated by people who were dishonest? > > Kay: Unless you're completely, certifiably insane, or a special kind of > narcissist, you regard yourself as normal. So I didn't really think that > much > of it. I was basically an introverted type, and I was already following my > own nose, and it was too late. I was just stubborn when they made me go > along. > > Binstock: So you called them on the lying. > > Kay: Yeah. But the thing that traumatized me occurred a couple years later, > when I found an old copy of Life magazine that had the Margaret > Bourke-White > photos from Buchenwald. This was in the 1940s -- no TV, living on a farm. > That's when I realized that adults were dangerous. Like, really dangerous. > I > forgot about those pictures for a few years, but I had nightmares. But I > had > forgotten where the images came from. Seven or eight years later, I started > getting memories back in snatches, and I went back and found the magazine. > That probably was the turning point that changed my entire attitude toward > life. It was responsible for getting me interested in education. My > interest > in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help > children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults. The > European Invasion In Computer Science > > Kay: You should talk to William Newman, since he's here. He was part of the > British brain-drain. There was also Christopher Strachey, whom I consider > one > of the top 10 computer scientists of all time. The British appreciate him. > They also had Peter Landin. They had memory management and they had > timesharing before we did. Then there was a crisis in the early 1960s. And > suddenly the young Brits were coming to the United States. > > William was one of the guys who literally wrote the book on computer > graphics: Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics with Robert Sproull. > William came to Harvard and was Ivan Sutherland's graduate student -- got > his > Ph.D. in 1965 or 1966. William followed Ivan out to Utah; then when Xerox > PARC was set up, William came to PARC. > > A similar thing happened, but I think for different reasons, in France. So > one of the things we benefited from is that we got these incredibly > well-prepared Brits and French guys reacting to the kind of devil-may-care > attitude, and funding like nobody had ever seen before. These guys were > huge > contributors. For example, the first outline fonts were done by Patrick > Baudelaire at PARC, who got his Ph.D. at Utah. The shading on 3D is named > Gouraud shading after Henri Gouraud, who was also at Utah -- also under > Ivan, > when Ivan was there. > > The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural > resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. > When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so > error-free? > The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. > > Computing as Pop Culture > > Binstock: You seem fastidious about always giving people credit for their > work. > > Kay: Well, I'm an old-fashioned guy. And I also happen to believe in > history. > The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing > not-quite-a-field. > > Binstock: You once referred to computing as pop culture. > > Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed > music, for instance, needs a pop culture. There's a tendency to > over-develop. > Brahms and Dvorak needed gypsy music badly by the end of the 19th century. > The big problem with our culture is that it's being dominated, because the > electronic media we have is so much better suited for transmitting > pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to > be a developed part of high culture. Anything that's been worked on and > developed and you [can] go to the next couple levels. > > Binstock: One thing about jazz aficionados is that they take deep pleasure > in > knowing the history of jazz. > > Kay: Yes! Classical music is like that, too. But pop culture holds a > disdain > for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're > participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the > future > -- it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who > write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] -- > and > the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural > resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. > When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so > error-free? > The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. > > The Browser -- A Lament > > Binstock: Still, you can't argue with the Web's success. > > Kay: I think you can. > > Binstock: Well, look at Wikipedia -- it's a tremendous collaboration. > > Kay: It is, but go to the article on Logo, can you write and execute Logo > programs? Are there examples? No. The Wikipedia people didn't even imagine > that, in spite of the fact that they're on a computer. That's why I never > use > PowerPoint. PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to > me, > that is a kind of a moral crime. That's why I always do, not just dynamic > stuff when I give a talk, but I do stuff that I'm interacting with > on-the-fly. Because that is what the computer is for. People who don't do > that either don't understand that or don't respect it. > > The marketing people are not there to teach people, so probably one of the > most disastrous interactions with computing was the fact that you could > make > money selling simulations of old, familiar media, and these apps just > swamped > most of the ideas of Doug Engelbart, for example. The Web browser, for > many, > many years, and still, even though it's running on a computer that can do > X, > Y, and Z, it's now up to about X and 1/2 of Y. > > Binstock: How do you mean? > > Kay: Go to a blog, go to any Wiki, and find one that's WYSIWYG like > Microsoft > Word is. Word was done in 1974. HyperCard was 1989. Find me Web pages that > are even as good as HyperCard. The Web was done after that, but it was done > by people who had no imagination. They were just trying to satisfy an > immediate need. There's nothing wrong with that, except that when you have > something like the Industrial Revolution squared, you wind up setting de > facto standards -- in this case, really bad de facto standards. Because what > you definitely don't want in a Web browser is any features. > > PowerPoint is just simulated acetate overhead slides, and to me, that > is > a kind of a moral crime. > > Binstock: "Any features?" > > Kay: Yeah. You want to get those from the objects. You want it to be a > mini-operating system, and the people who did the browser mistook it as an > application. They flunked Operating Systems 101. > > Binstock: How so? > > Kay: I mean, look at it: The job of an operating system is to run arbitrary > code safely. It's not there to tell you what kind of code you can run. Most > operating systems have way too many features. The nice thing about UNIX > when > it was first done is not just that there were only 20 system commands, but > the kernel was only about 1,000 lines of code. This is true of Linux also. > > Binstock: Yes. > > Kay: One of the ways of looking at it is the reason that WYSIWYG is slowly > showing up in the browser is that it's a better way of interacting with the > computer than the way they first did it. So of course they're going to > reinvent it. I like to say that in the old days, if you reinvented the > wheel, > you would get your wrist slapped for not reading. But nowadays people are > reinventing the flat tire. I'd personally be happy if they reinvented the > wheel, because at least we'd be moving forward. If they reinvented what > Engelbart, did we'd be way ahead of where we are now. > > Objects > > Kay: The flaw there is probably the fact that C is early-bound. Because > it's > not late-bound, because it's not a dynamic system, pretty much the only way > you can link in features is to link them in ahead of time. Remember when we > had to boot the computer? There's no need for that. There's never been any > need for it. Because they did it that way, you wind up with megabytes of > features that are essentially bundled together whether you want them or > not. > And now a thousand system calls, where what you really want is objects that > are migrating around the net, and when you need a resource, it comes to > you -- > no operating system. We didn't use an operating system at PARC. We didn't > have applications either. > > Binstock: So it was just an object loader? > > Kay: An object exchanger, really. The user interface's job was to ask > objects > to show themselves and to composite those views with other ones. > > Binstock: You really radicalized the idea of objects by making everything > in > the system an object. > > Kay: No, I didn't. I mean, I made up the term "objects." Since we did > objects > first, there weren't any objects to radicalize. We started off with that > view > of objects, which is exactly the same as the view we had of what the > Internet > had to be, except in software. What happened was retrograde. When C++ came > out, they tried to cater to C programmers, and they made a system that was > neither fish nor fowl. And that's true of most of the things that are > called > object-oriented systems today. None of them are object-oriented systems > according to my definition. Objects were a radical idea, then they got > retrograded. > > Binstock: How do you view the Actor model? > > Kay: The first Smalltalk was presented at MIT, and Carl Hewitt and his > folks, > a few months later, wrote the first Actor paper. The difference between the > two systems is that the Actor model retained more of what I thought were > the > good features of the object idea, whereas at PARC, we used Smalltalk to > invent personal computing. It was actually a practical programming language > as well as being interesting theoretically. I don't think there were too > many > practical systems done in Actors back then. > > Binstock: Are you still programming? > > Kay: I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more > powerful programming languages. I do two kinds of programming. I do what > you > could call metaprogramming, and programming as children from the age of 9 > to > 13 or 14 would do. I spend a lot of time thinking about what children at > those developmental levels can actually be powerful at, and what's the > tradeoff between...Education is a double-edged sword. You have to start where > people are, but if you stay there, you're not educating. > > Extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them > in a > way they don't deserve > > The most disastrous thing about programming -- to pick one of the 10 most > disastrous things about programming -- there's a very popular movement based > on pattern languages. When Christopher Alexander first did that in > architecture, he was looking at 2,000 years of ways that humans have made > themselves comfortable. So there was actually something to it, because he > was > dealing with a genome that hasn't changed that much. I think he got a few > hundred valuable patterns out of it. But the bug in trying to do that in > computing is the assumption that we know anything at all about programming. > So extracting patterns from today's programming practices ennobles them in > a > way they don't deserve. It actually gives them more cachet. > > The best teacher I had in graduate school spent the whole semester > destroying > any beliefs we had about computing. He was a real iconoclast. He happened > to > be a genius, so we took it. At the end of the course, we were free because > we > didn't believe in anything. We had to learn everything, but then he > destroyed > it. He wanted us to understand what had been done, but he didn't want us to > believe in it. > > Binstock: Who was that? > > Kay: That was Bob Barton, who was the designer of the Burroughs B5000. He's > at the top of my list of people who should have received a Turing Award but > didn't. The award is given by the Association for Computing Machinery > (ACM), > so that is ridiculous, but it represents the academic bias and software > bias > that the ACM has developed. It wasn't always that way. Barton was probably > the number-one person who was alive who deserved it. He died last year, so > it's not going to happen unless they go to posthumous awards. > > It's like the problem Christian religions have with how to get Socrates > into heaven, right? You can't go to heaven unless you're baptized. If > anyone > deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so this is a huge problem. > > Binstock: I don't think they do that. > > Kay: They should. It's like the problem Christian religions have with how > to > get Socrates into heaven, right? You can't go to heaven unless you're > baptized. If anyone deserves to go to heaven, it's Socrates, so this is a > huge problem. But only the Mormons have solved this -- and they did it. They > proxy-baptized Socrates. > > Binstock: I didn't realize that. One can only imagine how thankful Socrates > must be. > > Kay: I thought it was pretty clever. It solves a thorny problem that the > other churches haven't touched in 2,000 years. Group Work > > Kay: Have you interviewed Vint Cerf? > > Binstock: No. > > Kay: He's a very special guy. Not just for brains. He's one of the better > organizers of people. If you had to point to one person, given that the > Internet was a community effort, the one who made that community work was > Vint. And he also was the co-guy on TCP/IP. I love him. I've known him for > years. He runs a pretty tough, pretty organized meeting, but he does it so > well that everyone likes it. > > [Digression on who, in addition to Cerf, should have won various computing > prizes...] > > The prizes aren't a thing that Dr. Dobb's worries about, because prizes are > mostly for individuals, not for teams that are trying to do serious > engineering projects. The dynamics are very different. A lot of people go > into computing just because they are uncomfortable with other people. So it > is no mean task to put together five different kinds of Asperger's syndrome > and get them to cooperate. American business is completely fucked up > because > it is all about competition. Our world was built for the good from > cooperation. That is what they should be teaching. > > Binstock: That's one of the few redeeming things about athletics. > > Kay: Absolutely! No question. Team sports. It's the closest analogy. > Everyone > has to play the game, but some people are better at certain aspects. > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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