
Alan Kay: The computer revolution hasn't happened yet - henning
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2950949730059754521
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tapostrophemo
Does it seem to anybody else that we've actually stagnated instead of moved
the field of computing forward during the last 10 years? Sure, machines are
faster, we've got more bandwitdth, etc., but we're still "automating" stuff,
rather than transcending the "pink plane".

Or, is it just that I've spent too much time at the dayjob, hacking Java
together to make the customer happy?

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david927
Completely stagnated. In another great quote from Alan Kay he says, "Java and
C++ make you think that the new ideas are like the old ones. Java is the most
distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS."

I think it was the demand/money. Once the PC revolution hit, there was so much
to do just to automate current processes that we got lost in the workload. It
doesn't help that our industry is both woefully ignorant of its past and
horribly dogmatic about its present.

That said, there are some very good people currently working in this space --
looking for the "pink plane". I'm very optimistic about this area actually.

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tapostrophemo
(I think/hope you meant looking for the "blue plane", unless the reason for
looking for the pink one is to see what it is we're trying to transcend.)

I'm curious; who are these people? What are they working on? Can I help?

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david927
Yes, I meant the blue plane. (It's an old presentation -- I didn't watch it
again -- but an important one.)

The people are: Alan Kay himself, Charles Simonyi, and a company I'm
affiliated with called Anemach. They each have very different approaches and
we'll just have to wait and see what comes next.

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NickSmith
"OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of
state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in
Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is
possible, but I'm not aware of them."... Alan Kay 2003

[http://userpage.fu-
berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht25Ht/doc_kay...](http://userpage.fu-
berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht25Ht/doc_kay_oop_en)

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iamwil
I thought his style of presentation had much to improve on, but it shed new
light on what he intended with smalltalk. Apparently, encapsulation was only
really one small part of his whole idea.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=78364>

I think this particular post sums up his ideas in his presentation. Also,
watch it with 1997 in mind. That's why he rails against MS so much.

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henning
He always seem so sad and wistful. He always seems to be lamenting things.

But, he's still so influential that he can't be ignored.

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phony_identity
It's some indication of the greatness of James Watson that he shows up even in
a talk about OO programming.

E pur si muove

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mattjaynes
Wow, just watched this. Really fascinating talk - especially his points about
the wonders of scalable computation in biology and how clunky man-made
computation seems in comparison so far. Definitely worth the watch.

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mdemare
Is there a transcription, or an abstract? I haven't got time for video.

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mynameishere
It's one of the better talks I've listened to (it's been posted before) and I
usually can't sit through such things.

