Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]

He's been here on HN as well in the past.

I think Quora is "a poor imitation of old static text media" that's difficult to browse and not very accessible, since it takes so much clicking and waiting to open up "more" buttons and follow replies and threads, and is impossible to easily print, or just scroll, skim, and search through, so I collected Alan Kay's answers, some discussion we had, plus some more discussion with David Rosenthal (who developed NeWS with James Gosling), here:

"Alan Kay on “Should web browsers have stuck to being document viewers?” and a discussion of Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/alan-kay-on-should-web-browser...

Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures, and audio and video recordings).”

Also here's a collection of HyperTIES discussions from Hacker News (including some discussion with Ben Shneiderman about why hypertext links are blue):

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

He's been known to answer questions and leave comments right here on Hackernews: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=alankay

Xerox made a ROI of 20000% on the laser printer alone [1]. A better version lecture Alan did for Ycombinator startups [2] but doesn't focus on the return of investment.

Xerox did shrink a bit since then.

[1] https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1828 [2] https://youtu.be/1e8VZlPBx_0?t=975

Alan thinks [0] "The Dream Machine" book [1] is the only accurate and good book on Xerox PARC.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22379275

[1] The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop

PARC (at least the UI that came out of it) is replicable in terms of a new UI paradigm: The virtual headset is criminally underutilized.

How much is computer interface restricted by the little window (even a 4k TV) we get as the view into the computer? The promise to me of a VR headset UI is having an arbitrary amount of real estate to display information (and not just 2D!)

And here's the thing about a good VR UI: it wouldn't just be the visible! Your brain can track the location of things subconsciously, so the log tailing window, the metrics window, that upload/download/file copy status window, can all be in some area you turn your head to glance at to get occasional information on.

Because the PARC UI's windowing system is designed to help out with the "limited viewport": it already recognized that people will do more applications/tasks than there is visible screen space, so you need an overlaid windowing system.

But right now, facebook is the sociopaths in control of VR headsets, so ... we'll be waiting for a while.

The talk is so refreshing, so indicative of research in the 1960s. I think in retrospect from listening to the talk is that all researchers had to do was the possible. What they didn't have to think about was the consequences of technology.

That is not the world we live in now. It is apparent that we are a civilization facing the Fermi Paradox/Great Filter. He alluded to it in the human evolution and human organizations part of the intro, but it is fundamentally structured around post-WWII viewpoint, not the modern view where literally every person's consumption is a step towards collective destruction.

he elaborates on how concepts and ideas and schooling are misleading by nature quite a bit in the talk, though if he says that sentence i haven't gotten to it yet. (i've seen him say it elsewhere)

https://youtu.be/dZQ7x0-MZcI?t=8m33s 'our minds are like theaters. (...) we treat our beliefs as reality. that is the worst thing about human beings. and these theaters are tiny; we can only think of a few things at once, it's hard for us to take in larger things. (...) we grow up in whatever culture we were born into. (...) our conclusions tend to be societal—that's a disaster!'

https://youtu.be/dZQ7x0-MZcI?t=57m9s 'because our brains want to believe, rather than think, these can turn into something like a religion. the reason we don't want to come up with blind belief: there's always more, and what it is, is something that we can't imagine. so when we give a name to something, we (...) hurt our ability to think more about it, because it already has a set of properties, it already is the thing the word denotes.' (beautifully illustrated in the video)

https://youtu.be/dZQ7x0-MZcI?t=60m 'school is the best thing ever invented to keep you from thinking about something important for more than a few minutes'

perhaps unsurprisingly, when i explained this on here two days ago, it got downvoted to -2, because hn's comment section is kind of the intellectual antithesis of alan kay: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39586470

i keep being optimistic but you people make me so sad

I read more books before I was 12 than I read between 12 and 20... I certainly shared his dismay for what I was being taught.

(and I have consumed less (books) each decade. :/)

Thanks a lot for this (and to other posters). 20 minutes into Normal Considered Harmful and can tell I'm going to binge watch/listen to Kay over the next few weeks. Extremely appreciative.

I find it mind-boggling that he has been doing this for 50+ years.

1995, not 1955.

This is an outstanding paper; one of my favorites in all of computing. Read it and marvel at all that Kay has been part of.

That's because computers are dumb servants. And that's a good thing, because computer solutions should be task specific. The human has agency and sometimes imagination, and the computer's job is to solve a problem as transparently as possible with as little cognitive load as possible.

Human language is optimised for human relationships, not for task-specific problem solving. It's full of subtext, context, and implication.

As soon as you try to use natural language for general open-ended problem solving you get lack of clarity and unintended consequences. At best you'll have to keep repeating the request until you get what you want, at worst you'll get a disaster you didn't consider.

to my mind at least part of the issue here is human communication languages are fundamentally lossy by nature. Everything has too many meanings and requires inference. This is why when able to communicate with code it gets so much easier because it has to be exactly right or the computer fails. And at least because it is consistent we can debug and fix that communication and once that is done it will work with reasonable consistency.

There are things about human language that are fundamentally at odds with effective communication with a computer (or engineering in general).

One example is ambiguity. Every human language has faculties for ambiguity, which is crucial in many human interactions and relationships. The ability to make implicit requests or suggestions while maintaining plausible deniability is valuable, even in situations that are non-adversarial.

In contrast, when communicating with an OS or engineering a mechanical device, ambiguity is a negative and it's crucial to use language that is deterministic.

There is a very real degree to which people are only capable of thinking clearly about complex systems to the degree they are comfortable with tools such as mathematics and programming that can be used to unambiguously describe them.

Humans communicate mainly with language and no OS provides this in a satisfactory way for the average user.

Most humans would have nothing to say to an OS. I am a software engineer and most of the time I function many levels of abstraction away from the OS. Most of my work doesn't even run on the same OS I work in, and when it runs, it talks to an OS that's not even running on an actual computer, but a construct that looks like a computer, but is entirely made up by a hypervisor.

I agree. I think one way to achieve that is to first acknowledge the important distinction between modes of programming and levels of abstraction. See, even in programming, we’re still restricted to a given domain. A web dev does not program to the network stack, thus needs not to known NICs and TCP frames internals. The web dev only interacts with the lower levels via high level parameters (data) through the low level APIs, which are already done and settled, not directly with code. The same goes for each layer and domain. Now, expecting users to write actual code is not realistic or sustainable. What’s more reasonable is to imagine a scenario where users needs only to give the parameters for the functions which are already done and settled. So, composing super high level functions in an environment which disposes of an extensive library of utilities seems the way to go. Users already do parameterization everyday, such as when they press buttons and fill forms. What’s missing is simply an abstraction which gives them the power to compose those functions. Regarding the paradigmatic framing for an end user language, I think stack-based programming offers a superior model, because the context window is directly visible and easy to track and reason, but more than that, stack languages offer a good avenue for learning, since it’s the easiest model to teach by analogy, even physical analogies can be made. It boils down to just pushing and popping in a coherent order. The order of operations is in fact the program. Hard to beat this simplicity and universality.

A first-class programming language (not an LLM) to talk to the computer's OS along with a rich library is the most important missing component IMO.

That "programming language" might just be ability to have generative interfaces (LLM based).

Humans communicate mainly with language and no OS provides this in a satisfactory way for the average user. LLMs literally fix this.

That’s true, but I think the core of human communication has always been half of what you’ve listed - low intelligence, hating, spam and narcissism. It’s just more obvious and amplified online as you can see everyone engaging with it all at the same time. In pre-internet times, you’d need to be physically present and see maximum a bar-full amount of people doing that.

I’m still very hopeful we will use the tech to help up us with some non-communication related things. Maybe something that’ll even off-ramp people outside the internet world.

We tried that, and it worked briefly.

Where and when?

I am a big fan of just in time on the fly UI and LLMs seem to make that possible now with some of the fast token outputs there are a couple of experiments [1]using image for now and I expect this to be more useful in not too long.

[1] https://twitter.com/sincethestudy/status/1761099508853944383...

I'm not Alan, but I'm pretty sure he isn't too happy about it.

Bret Victor's DynamicLand seems to be a direct descendent of many of these ideas. RealTalk's reactive DB combines Linda tuplespace ideas with LISP 71 pattern matching and reactive semantics. Each Realtalk object is self contained and can't be 'messed with' externally. It's all introspective and reconfigurable, etc

And static type calculus as seen in the MLs, Haskell, and lately C++.

you may or may not be aware that when he headed vpri, they did some substantial research into some of the other important ways to organize software, including things like array languages, david p. reed's work on spatially replicated computation, and cooperating communities of specialized solvers.

I'm very interested in knowing what array languages they were researching. The only thing I can find is Nile[1] but from the examples it doesn't look like an array language to me.

[1] https://github.com/damelang/nile

I recently got back into Objective-C (first did in 2002) doing some (for hire) framework work on an app that was built in it originally. And it's very refreshing! I've done a lot of C in between then and now, and I almost have to keep reminding myself that it's C under the hood, really.

Cincom Systems has been a pioneer of extremely productive programming tools since ever. My first real programming internship was on an IBM 4381 running their Mantis 4GL tool (in 1984-ish).

I like to compare it to Ruby on Rails. Mantis is Ruby on Rails for the 3278 (and Dataflex 2 would be Ruby on Rails for the VT-100).

With a live programming model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_coding

The dream isn't dead, a number of people are working on it. Several live systems are demonstrated in talks on Youtube.

There are several working systems and even a real OS with native device drivers on modern bare hardware.

You can run legacy code under its qemu sandbox, but that is added only to broaden its appeal to customers as this part is not 'live'.

Apply to YC for fun and see if they'll fund you. It's a long shot due to the non-commercial nature. But who knows? If you do, include me in it. I'm not the best OS dev, but I do know Pharo. I'm up for making a YC application if you are! ;-)

My email is in my profile if you'd want to entertain this idea.

There was a CDClabs github version and the Frank/STEPS code. Contact me, its burried in my 20 TB archive.

Symlink to a shared directory

We've been doing it. Write a paper (or a comment) with footnotes that link in order to the resources that should be included in the trail. At your peril, feel free to add as little context as possible (down to none—so it's just the links).