
A Conversation with Alan Kay (2004) - astdb
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523
======
dang
Submitters: Please don't editorialize titles, such as by cherry-picking one
detail from the article and making that the title instead. This is in the site
guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

If you want to say what you think is important about an article, please do so
in a comment. Then your view is on a level playing field with everyone else's:
[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22level%20playing%20field%22&sort=byDate&type=comment)

(Submitted title was _Alan Kay: ““Maxwell’s Equations of Software ”“_ )

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lioeters
> that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school — when I
> finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of
> the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself.

> These were Maxwell’s Equations of Software! This is the whole world of
> programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

Here's the whole (short) section, which culminates in the definition of eval.

"An Universal Lisp Function" [http://web.cse.ohio-
state.edu/~rountev.1/6341/pdf/Manual.pdf...](http://web.cse.ohio-
state.edu/~rountev.1/6341/pdf/Manual.pdf#page=18)

~~~
BoiledCabbage
If you haven't watched it - check out William Byrd on "The Most Beautiful
Program Ever Written"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OyfBQmvr2Hc)

It's the above and deriving it. It is fascinating to think of it as the
essence of a language in 13 lines.

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dang
Submitted many times but never many comments. Leaving out the ones with zero,
we have:

2019 (1):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19051447](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19051447)

2016 (6):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12898862](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12898862)

2015 (4):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9588504](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9588504)

2012 (11):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3945146](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3945146)

2011 (1):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2114193](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2114193)

2010 (4):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1407218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1407218)

2009 (10):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515188](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515188)

2007 (1):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72079](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=72079)

------
somewhereoutth
Sometimes I think the most interesting thing about (and perhaps the only
_deep_ problem concerning) software is complexity. Never before in the history
of the constructed world, of human artifact realisation, has it been possible
to create complexity on such scale.

For a given design problem there are usually a handful of sensible solutions,
so the solution complexity is bounded below accordingly. With buildings,
machines etc, the laws of physics and economics bounds potential solutions
above. This is not the case with software! Given the ever increasing amounts
of processing and memory available, solution complexity is bounded above only
by human ingenuity (particularly the kind of ingenuity that emerges from large
groups) - and occasionally the necessity for someone to actually understand
what is going on.

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JadeNB
What happened to those quotes in the title?

Anyway, reminder, while you're visiting ACM, that the entire Digital Library,
including books, is free to download until June 30, 2020:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22794984](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22794984)
.

------
JacobiX
Very interesting conversation, the only thing that I wasn't expecting is the
Egyptian pyramid analogy. Maybe I misunderstood something, but I think that
Egyptian pyramid has a great structural integrity ? "Most software today is
very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of
each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and
thousands of slaves."

~~~
andrekandre
i think his point isnt so much about structural integrity as it is with volume
and required effort to get that structrual integrity

a pyriamid is a huge srtucture with tiny tiny passages that are of use to
almost no one, which took massive amounts of work and time to accomplish

whereas a cathedral constructed mostly of arches made of less than 100th or a
1000th of the material could scale to the size of a pyramid yet internally be
mostly air

taken further, a geodisic dome could scale even further and easily encolse
both, with even less materials

so what he is saying is, architecture matters in relation to effort,
scalability and also structural integrity

------
mpweiher
"A Conversation with Alan Kay (2004)"

------
ssivark
Oh, boy! This interview has oodles more thought provoking stuff beyond the
“Maxwell’s equations” quote. Sometimes I feel like we worship more than
actually listening to what is being said (and thinking about it and
understanding it).

> _Perhaps it was commercialization in the 1980s that killed off the next
> expected new thing. Our plan and our hope was that the next generation of
> kids would come along and do something better than Smalltalk around 1984 or
> so. We all thought that the next level of programming language would be much
> more strategic and even policy-oriented and would have much more knowledge
> about what it was trying to do. But a variety of different things conspired
> together, and that next generation actually didn’t show up. One could
> actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal
> computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable
> retrogression in many, many respects. You could think of it as putting a
> low-pass filter on some of the good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as
> computing spread out much, much faster than educating unsophisticated people
> can happen. In the last 25 years or so, we actually got something like a pop
> culture, similar to what happened when television came on the scene and some
> of its inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the
> masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have more
> perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to do was to
> capture people as they were. So I think the lack of a real computer science
> today, and the lack of real software engineering today, is partly due to
> this pop culture._

> _The user interface, which is still the predominant approach today, is a
> user interface as the access to function. If the area is interesting, you
> eventually wind up with something that looks like the control panel of a
> nuclear reactor. So this is the agglutination of features. [...] Corporate
> buyers often buy in terms of feature sets. But at PARC our idea was, since
> you never step in the same river twice, the number-one thing you want to
> make the user interface be is a learning environment—something that’s
> explorable in various ways, something that is going to change over the
> lifetime of the user using this environment. New things are going to come
> on, and what does it mean for those new things to happen? This means
> improvements not only in the applications but also in the user interface
> itself._

> _SF — What do you wish you had done differently in the Smalltalk era? AK — I
> had the world’s greatest group, and I should have made the world’s two
> greatest groups. I didn’t realize there are benefits to having real
> implementers and real users, and there are benefits to starting from scratch
> every few months. I hired finishers because I’m a good starter and a poor
> finisher, but it took me a long time to realize that I was interfering with
> them by trying to improve things._

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ryanmarsh
Boomers still talking about Smalltalk yet we have an explosion in new
programming languages and no one has brought it back to life. You have your
pick of mature VM’s. The most popular VM (by installs) even has a popular and
extensible transpilation library. The opportunity is there Boomers, build
Woodstock again.

So if Smalltalk was so great where is babel-plugin-smalltalk or smalltalk-jvm?
Frankly I’m not even going to google and see if they exist. The point is I
don’t know of them and no one I know is using them.

~~~
bitwize
Banks and other major companies use Smalltalk as a "secret weapon". I put it
on my résumé as a skill (mainly because I was arsing about with Squeak in the
early 2000s), and recruiters kept calling me about it. Even though it's not
publicly acknowledged that these companies are using it.

~~~
freedomben
Can you tell me more about this? Are you saying that banks and other major
companies have "secret" ish projects in small talk that give them a
competitive advantage somehow? What are they used for? high speed trading
maybe?

I've worked with a lot of banks and only ever see Java and Python (mostly Java
tho). For high speed trading systems I've usually heard of C/C++

