
Alan Kay on Hoping That “Simple” is not “Too Simple” - mbrubeck
http://computinged.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/alan-kay-on-hoping-that-simple-is-not-too-simple/
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btilly
_I’m guessing that this is where similar computer students with undergraduate
degrees might wind up — essentially doing bricklaying in some corporate notion
of architecture._

"Bricklaying in some corporate notion of architecture." That is an excellent
description of what a lot of software developers actually do.

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stcredzero
It's more like plumbing, actually.

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andreyf
I wish Alan had at least hinted at his partitioning of the ways “humans make
and do things”.

I can only think of it in terms of my undergrad curriculum (where I apparently
“didn’t learn much that is good”). There’s math, which gives us many formal
ways of thinking about things. That intersects with CS because most computers
have trouble with the natural ambiguity of our minds. Then there’s the
“Philosophy of Mathematics” or “CogSci”, which asks “what are we capable of
thinking?”, or more precisely “what kind of thinking can machines do for us?”,
and the practical side of that coin, which is what most of undergrad CS
focuses on: hardware architecture, operating systems, networking, compiler
theory, type theory, virtual machines, etc.

The latter-most is the bricklaying, I get that. I suppose the compiler and
language design might be architecture, and the epistemological questions might
be “modeling”? But then how is epistemology split up into three sub-divisions
of its own? Does this even make sense?

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duck
Why doesn't Alan Kay have a blog/site?

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apu
It's not a personal site, but he founded an institute which does really
awesome work on "fundamental new computing technologies", such as creating
powerful new languages and techniques for building a full software stack (from
OS to user-level apps) all within 20,000 lines of code!

<http://vpri.org/>

