
Alan Kay turns 80 today! Happy Birthday! - Rochus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
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armitron
I hope Alan Kay doesn't feel too bad seeing all the nearly limitless potential
he and his peers unveiled get squandered and captured by corrupt entities that
are slowly but surely strangling the very essence of the Internet he helped
create.

In the meantime, Tim Berners-Lee receives the Turing award.

~~~
detaro
> _In the meantime, Tim Berners-Lee receives the Turing award._

What's that side note supposed to mean?

~~~
armitron
The people who created the Internet vs the people who created the Web is a
recurring theme in Alan Kay's presentations.

Of course you can read a lot more into it, just look at the current state of
affairs.

~~~
detaro
ah, I always found that supposed difference not very convincing.

Both Kay and Berners-Lee deserve their Turing awards. Both have had good and
influential ideas. Ideasthat have taken a life of their own and didn't quite
turn into what they imagined, at least not in the mainstream.

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linguae
Alan Kay is one of my intellectual heroes. I've always been enamored by the
Macintosh, which was influenced by the work at Xerox PARC. However, it wasn't
until I started studying more about Xerox PARC within the past five years that
I received a better understanding of the vision of Alan Kay's work. Over the
past five years I've gone from a big Unix and C fan (who loved the NeXT
heritage of macOS but who didn't program in Objective-C, basically treating
macOS as a BSD that could run iPhoto) to someone who is in love with Smalltalk
and Lisp. I just started reading "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol," a book
that Alan Kay has spoken highly about.

One recent project from the now-shuttered Viewpoints Research Institute that
I've taken particular interest in is STEPS, which is an attempt to develop a
minimum-viable desktop operating system environment using a minimal amount of
code. The STEPS researchers achieved this goal by defining domain-specific
languages to describe and implement subsystems and applications. One of the
things I'm curious about is how well could something like STEPS be implemented
in a language like Common Lisp which provides macro support and also CLOS. I'm
curious if the work done in STEPS could be applied to production desktop
environments? The GNOME and KDE stacks rely on a lot of C and C++ code,
respectively, and it would be interesting to see if the use of very high-level
languages would result in a less complex stack. Granted, GNOME and KDE need to
support complexities such as accessibility and internationalization, but I'm
wondering if the lessons of STEPS can still be applied even to address these
considerations.

I wonder what advice Alan Kay has for young researchers who want to do long-
term, potentially revolutionary, open-ended research in an age that strongly
favors short-term, directed research that tends to be incremental and
iterative. Alan Kay came of age during a pre-Mansfield Amendment ARPA (where
ARPA used to heavily fund basic research in computer science before the
Mansfield Amendment of 1973 required ARPA to focus on funding research that
was directly related to defense) and also during the golden age of industrial
research labs, which ended in the 1990s. However, he has seen the landscape
transform to the current situation.

Happy birthday, Alan Kay! He's inspired me to discover and encourage the
beauty of computing, and his philosophy regarding research strongly resonates
with me.

~~~
pjmlp
I share the same feelings.

UNIX seemed a better architecture than the archaic MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 (not so
much when compared against Amiga).

However thanks to my university I was able to plunge into Xerox PARC universe
and its influences on ETHZ, and the more I learned reading their papers and
manuals, with playing with Smalltalk/V and Native Oberon, made me a very
grumpy UNIX user and eventually back into Windows/macOS world a couple of
years later.

Picking up on your examples, ironically with DBUS, gobject, KParts, gRPC one
could replicate the experience of such workstations on GNU/Linux, even
something similar to OLE (which goes back to Xerox PARC inline documents), or
OS wide REPL instead of plain old UNIX shell, but given the fragmentation of
Linux distributions it is in vain to try to offer such experience.

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Rochus
And Smalltalk-80 turns 40 this year.

~~~
pjmlp
Still innovating with Pharo.

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jecel
Here is a nice book his friends wrote for him on his 70th birthday:

[http://vpri.org/pov/](http://vpri.org/pov/)

