Alan Kay - Normal Considered Harmful

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).

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

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. :-)

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

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

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

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

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

"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