

Alan Kay: Inventing Fundamental New Computing Technologies - andreyf
http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm

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andreyf
Heya, lookie there, I knew name-dropping would help. For details, take a look
at these (they don't seem to get votes on their own):

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COLA_(software_architecture)>

<http://piumarta.com/software/cola/>

<http://piumarta.com/software/cola/coke.html>

Crazy neat stuff!

~~~
david927
>I knew name-dropping would help

Sadly, it doesn't just help; without it, no one would care at all. For all the
pathos we showed in these threads on 'Where is the innovation?':

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=522897>
<http://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=H31Hs9elK4>

the truth is, we don't care. We want innovation, but hard problems are...
well... hard. I've been working on a project with the same goals as
Viewpoint's for over 12 years, and getting attention or support has been
almost impossible.

~~~
mark_h
Does your project have a website?

~~~
david927
I initially put a caveat on my comment and then removed it -- and it admitted
that I haven't been very public about the work. The attention and support
would definitely be better if I published on Lambda, for example.

I didn't mean to moan about my project; I wanted to moan about lack of
interest in the problem. For example, where my work has been publicized, the
problem itself hasn't received much in the way of interest. Even the Ph.D.
students who have worked on it have said, "But [Lisp/Smalltalk/Java(I'm sadly
not joking here)/etc.] does everything you need to do." I shouldn't be
surprised; there's no one to blame here but human nature. But I'm still
occasionally frustrated. Of course, if you're interested in my project, my
email is in my profile.

~~~
andreyf
You must be talking to the wrong people. In my experience, when given the
liberty, people tend to approach problems with either "let's solve this!" and
"how can we solve this?". The former focuses on getting it done, the latter -
on what the best process of getting it done is. Neither is superior, but the
latter is who is interested in this stuff.

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mark_h
Hard to believe this hasn't been posted before; I was just reading a few of
their publications (<http://vpri.org/html/words_links/articles_ifnct.php>)
recently. There's some great stuff in there. The STEPS tech report is great
reading, and the reusable objects paper is pretty neat too.

Luke Gorrie is doing some work on COLA on the OLPC which is worth keeping an
eye on too: <http://lukego.livejournal.com/>

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stcredzero
His point about the expressiveness of today's systems is a very good one, and
there are other interesting examples to back it up.

BeOS/Haiku could fit an entire OS with full-featured desktop environment into
well under 150 Megabytes. There are also various small linux distros. The
Symbolics Lisp Machines are another example of this. I don't know how large
the installed OS was, but a friend who used to work for Symbolics told me that
on many occasions, customers of Symbolics would have their jaws drop when they
were told that the entire developer team had only 8 or so programmers.

The fact that it takes upwards of 4 gigabytes to store the code for a "modern"
OS and applications indicates there is a lot of room for improvement.

("Modern" really means kernel from the 70's plus window management and GUIs
from the 80's.)

~~~
cpr
The installed OS on the Symbolics machine was only a few hundred megs, from
long-vague memory. Much of that was a huge set of documentation.

I would venture to say that the MIT AI/Symbolics Lisp machine development crew
(Rick Greenblatt, Dave Moon, Howard Cannon, Mike McMahon, Daniel Weinreb,
sometimes RMS, and a not-too-large cast of others) probably developed the most
powerful operating system (written entirely in Lisp), compressed over the
shortest time period in history for any comparable project. I don't think the
tools they developed, and were using for their own further development, have
been equalled since. (Which is kind of sad, in a way.)

------
lunchbox
Check out this question Alan Kay asked on Stack Overflow:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-
in...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-inventions-
in-computing-since-1980)

