

A Conversation with Alan Kay - b-man
http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

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sjs

        I feel like my answers are quite trivial since nobody
        really knows how to design a good language, including me.
    

(the rest is not related to the above quote)

Alan mentions that education doesn't happen fast enough. Here's a crazy idea,
what if we leveraged the Internet to accelerate education? If 100 average
programmers from HN paid $1000/year to a great computer scientist to teach
them a few lessons per week it seems like everyone would win. That's a simple
example and there would be overhead costs for the infrastructure to setup such
a system, but it could have some interesting results. It would have the
potential to become a new kind of higher education. You could choose to
subscribe only to people you were interested in learning from.

I know there are a lot of unanswered questions about how it would all work. A
big one in my mind is whether it would be interactive & collaborative, or
broadcast style? I'd lean towards the former even though it'd be more complex.

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mmphosis
_The myth that it doesn’t matter what your processor architecture is—that
Moore’s law will take care of you—is totally false._

~~~
johkra
I had a look at the architecture of the B5000 system they're talking of
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems>).

It's really completely different from today's architectures and I have the
feeling we're emulating a lot of the functionality in software today. This
gives some credibility to Kay's claim that "a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox
PARC runs only 50 times faster today". (This number really baffled me.)

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johnlongawa
I always get tricked into thinking "Hey, some new stuff from Alan Kay" - only
to find some link to something he said years ago. Perhaps putting the year in
the title (2004 - or whatever the year the material is from) might prevent
people who really like and follow Kay from getting their hopes up.

