Lambda the Ultimate

inactiveTopic Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003
started 4/26/2003; 11:46:01 AM - last post 5/6/2003; 8:34:39 AM
Ehud Lamm - Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003  blueArrow
4/26/2003; 11:46:01 AM (reads: 1808, responses: 6)
Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003
Many people blogged this event, but I recommend these detailed notes from Cory Doctorow.

Be sure to read Alan Kay and Peter Deutch's corrections and clarifications. They are at the bootom of the page.


Posted to general by Ehud Lamm on 4/26/03; 11:49:55 AM

Marcus Denker - Re: Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003  blueArrow
5/4/2003; 8:49:37 AM (reads: 646, responses: 3)
Lisa Rein's Tour Of Alan Kay's Etech 2003 Presentation: http://ftp.archive.org/movies/lisarein/oreilly/etech2003/alankay/tour.html

Ehud Lamm - Re: Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003  blueArrow
5/5/2003; 12:46:56 PM (reads: 646, responses: 2)
That link doesn't work. Simply remove the tour.html, so you can access the directory.

I managed to download and view the presentation today, and it is really worth your time. Quite a few things caught my attention.

Sketchpad, the historic (or pre-historic), drowing program is described by Kay as a "non-linear graphical spreadsheet."

It is also described as a prototype based OO system. Is this an anachronism?

Kay makes a strong case for late binding. Those interested in the static/dynamic debate may find his comments to be of interest.

Finally, a cool quote. "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points."

Well, the truth of that surely depends on your point of view... How about this PL version: "Programming language paradigm is worth 70% less code" ?

Ehud Lamm - Re: Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003  blueArrow
5/5/2003; 11:43:49 PM (reads: 664, responses: 1)
Kay laments the "reeemergence of applications," in the sense that separate activities are perfromed using separate and unconnected applications.

This view point isn't surprising from somene coming from Smalltalk, and indeed kay also feels strongly about programming languages as operating systems.

However, one wonders if this really is the best way to achieve the sort of integration Kay wants. Other proposals (from DDE and OLE to cross language runtimes) exist, and seem to be on the way to becoming mainstream.

Ehud Lamm - Re: Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003  blueArrow
5/6/2003; 1:40:07 AM (reads: 697, responses: 0)
A bit more from Kay about the notion of "no applications".

Frank Atanassow - Re: Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003  blueArrow
5/6/2003; 6:51:27 AM (reads: 570, responses: 1)
You can d/l [Ivan Sutherland's Sketchpad] thesis from the MIT library for $6 -- it's comparable to Newton's acheivements.

Yeah, right. He must be referring to Newton's lesser known athletic achievements.

Next we'll be comparing Larry Wall to Aristotle, and Linux to the New Testament.

John McCarthy invented PDP1 interactive LISP -- a metainvention, the Maxwell's Equations of programming.

Or McCarthy to Maxwell.

This stuff is better than anything in our handhelds today. We could implement it from they papers they wrote then, but no one reads the papers that were written in the 60s.

And apparently Kay doesn't read papers written before the 60's, such as, for example, Church or Russell.

Java can't add code to itself while running -- LISP could do this 40 years ago.

Largely irrelevant. LISP embarks an interpreter in every runtime and has a trapdoor and a special syntax so you can feed it abstract syntax. It doesn't solve the essential problems of reflection which have to do with binding, environments and generating syntactically correct (and, in an ST system, typeable) programs. In Java you can get exactly the same effect by calling an interpreter dynamically.

Ehud Lamm - Re: Alan Kay's talk at O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003  blueArrow
5/6/2003; 8:34:39 AM (reads: 600, responses: 0)
it's comparable to Newton's acheivements...

Yeah, that's a bit of an exaggeration..