

Interview with Alan Kay and Danny Hillis - gruseom
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/kay.hillis_pr.html

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wingo
Great conversation!

I like the pervasive biological metaphor that they use. Intercellular enzymes
might operate with the precision of programs, but they float in a forgiving,
scalable goo. I want that goo in my software.

The most advanced programs we have now are about the equivalent of unicellular
organisms. It will be some time before we figure out how to make systems with
"life" and resilience.

Kay also mentions funding, which seems to be a cherished topic on this forum:
"[ARPA]'s like the goose that laid the golden eggs. When you start forcing the
process, it kills it. ARPA succeeded because they basically funded people
instead of projects. They didn't really care what the people were doing. They
figured neat people would do neat things... And, boy, it's really hard to find
any funding like that nowadays. "

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CUViper
_DH: You don't learn much by taking apart a dynabook, except not to do it. It
had never hit me before, but the current generation of kids don't even get to
hack the operating system._

Perhaps not in 1993, but now we have full open source environments to play in.
The code may not always be very comprehensible, but at least it's possible to
see what's going on under the hood.

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mark_h
From 1994 by the looks of it; I don't think that's apparent on the (print-
friendly) link, but it's all the more interesting with that in perspective!

Related topic: who would you consider the Kay, Hillis, etc of today? (apart
from Kay, Hillis, etc) Or can we only tell that sort of foresight in
hindsight?

~~~
gamache
_Related topic: who would you consider the Kay, Hillis, etc of today?_

I don't know that I would place Hillis on the same level as Kay, given the
conditions of today.

Right now, Apple is making a killing by selling machines whose user interface
is a descendant of Kay's work, whose programming environment is a descendant
of Kay's work, and whose form factor is a descendant of Kay's dynabook
concept. Kay, in effect, blueprinted today yesterday.

Hillis, on the other hand, made his impact in parallel computing. Whereas
Kay's work dealt with today (yesterday), the stuff Hillis did yesterday deals
with tomorrow. In the next decade or two, we might watch Hillis' work come to
fruition as Kay's already has.

~~~
prakash
good insight!

