[gunnihinn]

> Bret Victor is very much Alan Kay's protege and has unfortunately inherited the curse of people cherry-picking particular ideas and missing the bigger picture.

Maybe it's time we lay some of the blame for us idiots just not getting Alan Kay's ideas on Alan Kay. At this point he only has himself to blame if he's spent 50 years trying and failing to communicate his wonderful ideas.

[pavlov]

Honest question: who in this field has a better track record of their visionary ideas leading to real-world implementations than Alan Kay?

Not everything ended up being adopted in the form he envisioned or with the semantics he proposed, but there have been a lot of right calls and influential designs in his 50+ year career.

[davidy123]

Douglas Engelbart. Tim Berners-Lee. Smalltalk is pretty cool, though.

[pavlov]

What kind of impact did Engelbart have after "the mother of all demos"? Much more limited than Kay, IMO. Kay’s Dynabook is arguably just as important, and he went on to do a lot of other stuff.

Same for Berners-Lee. Sure, he remains influential over the web's incremental progress on W3C, but anything more visionary seems to be a miss: XHTML, semantic web, the Solid project...

[liveoneggs]

The mother of all demos is the world we live in now. He demonstrated a working model of 30 years into the future. It's like someone walking on stage and showing you what life will be in 2050.

Engelbart invented the mouse and the entire idea of pointing at things on the screen to interact with them. The results of that interaction is now what you call "the web" (hypertext).

[davidy123]

Englebart also substantially inspired Kay, but each of these people would probably have not had success without the network of ispirations. In fact I think we should talk about it like this; Bush->Englebart->Kay->Berners-Lee (superficially) rather than the individual on their own. It's also interesting that none of these people were at the head of big successful companies, though not surprising since that basically involves a lot of compromises.

[liveoneggs]

I agree entirely with you but had a hard time ignoring the "yeah but what have you done for me lately?" tone above

[pas]

I think his experiment with DSLs (VPRI STEPS project) is very insightful, I always herpderp about how we need better tools to in situ express "the domain", but of course reality has a very strong bias for keeping apparent complexity down, keeping cognitive friction between components minimal, leaky abstractions are bad so encapsulation has to be total, so it's extra hard as an afterthought (hence ORMs and middlewares tend to be very clunky), etc.

Though there are a few examples of moving in the right (?) direction, for example styled components (for React, which moves CSS into JS/TS code, there's a VScode plugin for it, and thanks to the tagged templates they can be validated).

[m_mueller]

I remember seeing a demo where A.K. used an experimental OS made with ~1k LOC using STEPS approach to actually run his slides. Never found the link to it again (if someone has it I'd appreciate), but even more importantly, I'd love to know what happened with that OS. It would seem like a great research OS going forward if it really had GUI, networking and FS expressed with such low amount of user code. It also seems to me the project coming closest to Engelbart's vision (as their NLS also did everything just by meta-programming to an assembler with increasingly high levels of abstraction).

[morphle]

Alan Kay addresses Qualcomm https://vimeo.com/82301919

[m_mueller]

Thank you! Is he actually running their own OS here, or is it just a scripted slide application? What I saw was more of a smaller talk given to students if I remember correctly, where he goes into the technical details of his setup a bit.

[morphle]

I am one of three people who have this code running live. It is way more amazing than you think, it is not scripted at all. Its a full OS/GUI personal computer in 20 KLOC, no external libraries. The graphics for example are just 435 lines of code (versus millions for Cairo).

[m_mueller]

Have you considered creating e.g. a YouTube Series going through it? Or contacting e.g. Computerphile? This is way too awesome not to share with the world. How did you get involved, have you been working for Alan Kay?

[jecel]

The OS (in 20K lines of code) is called "Frank" and in the talks where Alan uses it for his slides at one point he zooms out and you can see a cartoon Frankenstein monster in the top left corner.

You might find this list of Kay's talks interesting:

https://tinlizzie.org/IA/index.php/Talks_by_Alan_Kay

[morphle]

Please see the comments on this Morphle HN account for those Alan Kay talks or mail morphle &at& ziggo &dot& nl for all those Alan Kay links student lectures you remember.

[Ygg2]

Alan Kay is the Tesla of programming. Beautiful design, genius implementation but utterly impractical in 90% cases.

[1123581321]

He hasn't failed at all. What are you talking about? Dozens of programming languages are more sensible and ergonomic because of his influence.