[alankay]

A very important question! I don't know the answer, but I think it would be something that included FPGAs -- Intel has been making interesting hybrid chips that combine an ARM variant with a lot of FPGA real estate, and that would likely be a good basis.

[gpdpocketer]

What are your thoughts on the home-grown effort to produce small, portable .. and open .. computing devices, as represented by such as the Pyra Handheld and so on?

http://pyra-handheld.com/

Earlier iterations of the machines supported by this community utilized ARM-based CPU's that had smaller cores onboard that could be repurposed for other things .. audio and video codecs, 3d engines and so on.. maybe you have yet to see the Pyra/Pandora classes of devices?

[alankay]

The physical nature of the device needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about visual angle, resolution, pointing, drawing, typing, extensions of the hardware (especially via software), capacity, speeds that match to human nervous system, etc.

The software nature of the device also needs to match up to human abilities and needs: so I always ask questions about the GUI, how does it help in learning itself and other things, what kinds of things can I see and contrast and compare, what kinds of things can I do by programming, what kinds of things can kids do by programming.

And so forth. What do you think?

[no_identd]

Wild speculation ahead, but I'd speculate that it'd likely also include some of the following:

1. The Memfractor framework: http://slideplayer.com/slide/3869533/

https://hal-unice.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01322396/document

2. knowm's memristor based Hebbian Learning technology:

https://vimeo.com/125361591 (Their CEO has reddit btw.: https://www.reddit.com/user/010011000111/)

3. Some intentionally not-turing complete components with some recursivity in them, which is apparently possible:

http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2017/7276/pdf/LIPIcs...

"We further showed that certain variants of DOT’s recursive self types can be integrated successfully while keeping the calculus strongly normalizing. This result is surprising, as traditional recursive types are known to make a language Turing-complete."

"What is the minimum required change to achieve Turing-completeness? Consistent with our expectations from traditional models of recursive types, we demonstrate that recursive type values are enough to encode diverging computation."

"But surprisingly, with only non-recursive type values via rule (TTYP), we can still add recursive self types to the calculus and maintain strong normalization."

"Can we still do anything useful with recursive self types if the creation of proper recursive type values is prohibited? Even in this setting, recursive self types enable a certain degree of F-bounded quantification, ..."

+other langsec related hijinks, see also http://bootstrappable.org/ and http:// langsec.org/occupy/

4. Software (UX) & hardware (again: UX) elements/modular components that scale using morphic numbers, i.e. the golden ratio and the plastic number (whose square Donald E. Knuth likes to refer to as "High Phi". He even suggested a special mark for it, which nobody ever bothered to include in Unicode): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_number

5. Balanced ternary. We've recently made significant advances in solving the hardware issues with ternary hardware. For an example, see here: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/asp/jolpe/2017/0000001... Mirzaee, Reza Faghih; Farahani, Niloofar - Design of a Ternary Edge-Sensitive D FFF for Multiple-Valued Sequential Logic ( Preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03897 )

6. Spatial Analytic Interfaces: https://mspace.lib.umanitoba.ca/handle/1993/31595 Just take a look at the figures to see where this goes. Incidentally, this kind of user interface lends itself well for Dataflow programming...

7. Projective Programming: http://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax. See also the Racket Medic Debugger https://docs.racket-lang.org/medic/index.html / https://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/fpw15-lf.pdf, but far more importantly the sequel to it, called 'Ripple': https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3136019 Li, Xiangqi; Flatt, Matthew - Debugging with Domain-Specific Events via Macros

8. GNUnet and related hijinks, see https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/153d/578869863450766a870727... and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877908. See also P3KI, who FINALLY released a whitepaper: https://p3ki.com/docs/Decentralized_IPsec_VPN_using_P3KI_Cor...

9. Xanadu, Zettelkasten, Smalltalk, Lisp Machine, Plan 9, Inferno etc. related hyperlink crowd/mesh/cloud/grid/whatever hijinks, both for social and for programmatic cooperation. I'll not link anything on that here, since, well, kind of pointless to feed Alan Kay the kool-aid he in part came up with long ago. ;)

And then there exist a million other things that should go here, too, but for which I lack the time to type them out - I already consider this far, far too terse to make any sense to someone without A LOT of preexisting knowledge.