Alan Kay, 2015: Power of Simplicity

I'm not Alan, but I saw one of his talks[1] about how they did invent all those things we're using now, which you are very much referring to. What he said was important was to have a big horizon, at least 10 years. Anything less would not do. Then envision what should be possible in that time. "It would be ridiculous if $X wasn't possible in $Y years" and then backtrack on what would technically be required to make that happen. Rinse repeat. He said that with good company support and a good team, you often found yourself delivering at half that time none the less (but again, you should never constrain yourself to that little, or else you will stress towards performing, instead of thinking properly about the problems needing to be solved). Alan: Hope I didn't butcher your message too much :) [1] I think it might be this one, but I honestly haven't checked. See it anyway. It's a good talk. ▶ this video

in “Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today” · View on HN

Yes. A relevant quote from Alan Kay in his talk “the power of simplicity”: > one of the things that's worked the best the last three, or four hundred years, is you get simplicity by finding a slightly more sophisticated building block to build your theories out of. its when you go for a simple building block that anybody understand through common sense, that is when you start screwing yourself right and left, because it just might not be able to ramify through the degrees of freedom and scaling you have to go through, and it's this inability to fix the building blocks that is one of the largest problems that computing has today in large organizations. people just won't do it ▶ this video

in “Clever code is probably the worst code you could write (2023)” · View on HN

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] ▶ this video [2] [link]

in “Alan Kay's talk at UCLA – Feb 2024 [video]” · View on HN

Do you think that software should be architected as autonomous agents for it to scale infinitely? I watched an Alan Kay video [1] some time back. In the video, he had an argument about how software systems cannot scale unless the basis is the most complex "computation" system that we know -- that system being our own biological system. [1]: ▶ this video

in “Formal Systems in Biology” · View on HN

You’d probably like Bret Victor’s inventing on principle talk: [link] He demonstrates some good examples. I’m not quite sure it’s what you mean by visual, but it seems obviously valuable and tools that enabled some of what he shows would be really useful. I’m not sure why we don’t have these things - I think Alan Kay would say it’s because we stopped doing real research to improve what our tools can be. We’re just relying on old paradigms (I just watched this earlier today: ▶ this video )

in “Ask HN: Why isn’t visual programming a bigger thing?” · View on HN

On the other hand Alan Kay has made powerful arguments that systems can be made much simpler if only their building blocks were slightly less simple! It's a tough question. ▶ this video

in “Running servers and services well is not trivial (2018)” · View on HN

> “What [the computer field] needs first is a William of Occam, who said “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” The idea that it is worth while to put considerable effort into eliminating complexity and establishing the simple had a lot to do with the rise of modern science and mathematics, particularly from the standpoint of creating new aesthetics... The tricky thing is he argues for “sophistication” here[0], which on the surface seems antithetical. Picking (and committing-to) a (correct) abstraction can be tricky. Also, these “axioms” are often made true by useless qualifiers like “unnecessary” complexity, or even “complexity”. If it’s required , it’s not “complexity”, but a necessary implementation detail. Pick in good faith, keep a loose grip, have fun. [0] ▶ this video

in “Computer Software (1984)” · View on HN

Having watched nearly every talk/interview of Kay I could find on YouTube (which includes the OOPSLA keynote) and having read some of his writings I think I have a reasonably good understanding of what he is advocating for. Here is Kay talking about Internet's resilience in a bit more detail: ▶ this video >His position is strongly aligned with the "mechanism, not policy" philosophy. I don't see how this opposes or contradicts any of what I wrote above.

in “A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet” · View on HN

well, in this talk it sounds like you do advocate tool building - isn't tool building a way to try elliptic orbits instead of the circular ones ? ▶ this video 'Power of simplicity'

in “Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today” · View on HN

Alan Kay has a more generalized idea about building up abstractions that I like better. I think he mentioned it in this video ▶ this video I, like many in this thread, think that good people are more important than a particular programming language.

in “Ask HN: Is there evidence regarding PG's theory about powerful languages?” · View on HN

Check this video running in another thread. This a known Alan Kay talk, he did it already a few times. ▶ this video As an example of the type of research being done, you must be willing to build something that will be considered commodity in 15 years time at today's price. You won't get there with basic income.

in “Alan Kay on re-creating Xerox PARC's design magic at CDG” · View on HN

Reposting my comment from discussion [link] with a fixed YouTube link: > Now this right here ▶ this video is the problem: if you follow the idea of computers as virtualisers where it leads you do not , in the general case, end up with the flat backplane talked about from 23:15 and shown in the accompanying slide. (Actually, this is in turn probably just a symptom of another, more general problem.)

in “Soup – Alan Kay on Objects” · View on HN

Now this right here ▶ this video is the problem: if you follow the idea of computers as virtualisers where it leads you do not , in the general case, end up with the flat backplane talked about from 23:15 and shown in the accompanying slide. (Actually, this is in turn probably just a symptom of another, more general problem.)

in “Alan Kay at Startup School [video]” · View on HN