Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful

You can't fix a broken wheel. This web link post, the original NEXT webbrowser, tries to celebrate and revive the reinvention of the broken wheel. The World Wide Web, browser and html standards are a very broken wheel. Alan Kay, the inventor of personal computing, explains why: ▶ this video Some of the comments of youtube are fun too. This lecture Alan aimed at this particular audience, the computer science (programming) students at University of Illinois, where they programmed the second browser, the second broken wheel 20 years after Alan and Dan had showed them how do do it better. Dan Ingalls implemented most of Alan Kay's invention of the personal computer, in the following demo's he shows how to fix the webbrowser's broken wheel a bit. The Lively Kernel would be another way to fix html but retain the web. Two demos says it all: link link Their Squeak, Etoys and Croquet fixed it completely: Early Croquet demo: link Croquet in webbrowser: link Demo of webbrowser replacement: link Squeak and all its predecessors: link Etoys: link

If you're okay with a System 6 appearance, I've already made one < link >, for Advanced Mac Substitute < link >. I do appreciate Alan Kay's thinking, in particular his talk "Normal Considered Harmful" < ▶ this video > My own high-level language, Varyx, has somewhat LISPy internals and is very dynamic — for example, you can annotate a variable with a type that's determined only at run time — and has an eval() that insulates the caller from the payload and vice versa. You can sequester mutable state within a closure, which can't be cracked open. Using an experimental Varyx build with some bindings for Apple's Core Graphics API, I wrote a script that rendered an arrow cursor (which I donated to the ravynOS project). Perhaps we should talk. :-)

"A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points" - Alan Kay He said that in a video "nornal considered harmful" that you can find on Youtube[1]. He talks about it at 34:29 [1] ▶ this video

I hope the time spent was worth learning something new :). I think having new languages have access to the dom can have huge benefits to end users but as you said, the initial indicators aren't looking good. It seems that there isn't a general consensus on how the web should be handled as a target platform. There is a talk from Alan Kay[1] where he says the web should've been like an operating system kernel from the start (if you want the juicy part it is at 23:45). The fact that both the inital users of this tech, after unlocking these new abilities, opted to use it to increase performance for canvas, instead of trying to create real web experiences leads me to think that those developers share his viewpoint. [1] ▶ this video

Alan Kay has done a few lectures about exactly this phenomenon: his talk 'Normal Considered Harmful' in particular is worth a look as it pretty much goes straight to the heart of the issue: ▶ this video

Richard Feynman is the best teacher we know (explaining electricity): link He also explains seeing, heat, electro magnetism, elasticity and mirrors among other things. His academic lectures are just as good but too long and hard for laymen to follow. - Every time I switch on an electrical device I hear Feynman say 'Zzzzinggg' and I see the copper bars jiggling across town. - Every time I see a cup of hot liquid I hear Feynman say "jiggling atoms" - Watch his hands and fingers telling the more accurate science story, simulating the electrons and atoms. - I would say that this the most important video to see for any human being on the planet. De second most important thing would be half of Alan Kay's lectures ▶ this video Great video's to watch with your kids! (from 3-4 years and older).

Definitely! Although I'm not sure if Morphic[1] is the way forward for UX on the web, despite it only being 10kloc. XD [Anybody stumbling upon this comment, and wondering what Alan Kay is/was up to, this might be a good philosophical starter: ▶ this video ] 1. link

I love the function call timing story: > The iAPX 432 failure could best be summed up by a meeting of Intel marketroids and Tandem engineers who wanted to use the chip in their next generation machine, after the slides, the senior engineer asked: “How long does it take to execute a procedure call?” > The presenter looked it up. “Two hundred and fifty microseconds.” > Tom immediately walked out, followed by the majority of the Tandem software department. The presenter was poleaxed. “What did I say?” Found in comments to ▶ this video , but I saw it somewhere else, too, I just don't recall where. Doesn't anyone know?

It's funny you say that. This is something Alan Kay talks about at length. For example, watch the first 20 mins of this talk - ▶ this video Essentially, he asserts that computing (or computer science even) isn't a real field (like biology or physics). Most people can't name the early computing pioneers whose work they build on (not true in Physics or Biology, we celebrate the pioneers) nor are they familiar with the work that was done in the Xerox PARC days. It's gotten so bad that a lot of computer science research just assumes that what we have now is what's going to remain forever. In the 70's, all kinds of interesting ideas and experiments were tried. Hardware implemented VM's, direct manipulation programming, OS-free computing environments, highly re-configurable computing a la FPGA's, and hundreds more. Nowadays, we think that creating custom ASIC to run machine learning algorithms quicker is innovative and novel. All this to say that many of the ideas in Dynamicland aren't new. They're rooted in ideas that are decades old. If you look at Bret's papers he uses as references frequently, you'll notice how many of them are over 10 years old - link

Alan Kay's 'Normal Considered Harmful' is a good place to start (more about computing in general): ▶ this video

> as in other fields Well maybe it isn't a field after all. Maybe it's "pop culture" like this cranky old guy says ▶ this video .

You're all over the place here and your arguments make no sense whatsoever when examined. First, you conflate mass-appeal with some sort of objective "better" criterion which is of course bonkers. To use one of your own examples against you, there are hundreds of thousands of Java monkeys out there that are using glue other people made to tie together rocks to build stonewalls. Which do fail as soon as the weather stops being nice. Security (you should look into Java deserialization bugs), reliability, performance what do they know about any of these things? Second, you conflate late-binding as present in Lisp and Smalltalk with late-binding present in other dynamic languages. The two are not equivalent, a perfect example of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Lisp and Smalltalk will never become popular (read my previous comment), but that does not mean that they do not sit on an apex and still have a lot to give. To anyone interested in the "craft of programming", "the Art", there is nothing better period. Here are some references for you, from the masters themselves: [1] link [2] link [3] ▶ this video

"The Mess We're In" by Joe Armstrong: link "Normal Considered Harmful" by Alan Kay: ▶ this video

Of course not. I am in undergrad. But I think Alan Kay has been "exposed" to computer science, and I follow his logic, based on my limited scope of knowledge. ▶ this video

This is obviously entirely false if one takes "genius" to mean someone who does things a non-genius would not be able to do. There have been attempts in recent years to roll back and debase the definition of genius to be more compatible with egalitarianism (especially in parts of Europe) and the tenet of homogeneity but this is not what genius originally stood for. Fabian Tasano writes: "Regarding the version of “genius” that is currently in retreat but still occasionally used: many people seem to have a simplistic idea of what it takes to be one. According to one popular model, all that is required is an increase in the magnitude of certain qualities which everyone already possesses in some measure. Make the particular qualities pronounced enough, and you get to genius. But a better way to understand the concept — assuming we’re applying the word to (say) Gauss or Picasso, rather than John Cleese or Wayne Rooney — may be that a genius has a particular capacity, which on a certain level can seem obvious or unremarkable, but which no one else has. A genius, on this understanding, is a person uniquely capable of making a leap ‘off the path’. With hindsight the leap may seem simple or obvious, but at the time no one else was, apparently, capable of making it. A potential leap of this kind is made possible by preceding leaps. Nevertheless its actual occurrence may go on not happening for decades. During that time there may be clear pointers towards it. Yet it is not until a geniu

Interestingly, this was what Alan Kay was advocating for on the web: "A bytecode VM og something like X for graphics" [1]. When Lars Bak and Kasper Lund launched Dart [2], I found it sad that they weren't more bold - left CSS and the DOM alone, and created an alternative Content-Type. So you can choose to Accept 'application/magic-bytecode' [3] before text/html, if your client supports so. Sadly, we ended up with Web Assembly, which by the few talks I've seen, appears to only cater to that of graphic/game developers, with no support for dynamic or OO languages. [1] ▶ this video [2] link [3] Or in Dart lingo, a VM snapshot.

Very well said. The focus on convenience and cool features over safety makes me really sad, and want to force automotive engineers to watch some Alan Kay talks. He loves to talk how people who don't know the history and basics of their craft will arrive at inferior solutions, for example in this one: ▶ this video

Similar claim was made by Alan Kay in his lecture Normal Considered Harmful [1]. However he didn't complain about lower barriers to entry. Instead he pointed out that the people in the 90s ignored the work and experience of the past generations of programmers. He especially criticized the Web. [1] ▶ this video

I think Mr. Granger should refrain from using inaccurate remarks about the history of programming. Light Table is neat but it is not the first attempt at an interactive development environment. His ideas were quite common 30+ years ago (20 years ago would have been right about the time when this style of programming started falling out of vogue). Alan Kay does a far better job than I can in explaining some of this history: ▶ this video Update I wasn't being terribly fair. Granger might simply not have been aware. In that case I hope he sees my comment and watches the above video. :)

You might find this entertaining - I'm watching a speech by Alan Kay at the moment where he says that computing is more pop-culture than science: ▶ this video