Comment by grinich | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grinich | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I've admired Alan Kay's work for years, but I wish he had another Jobs/Apple to turn his ideas into products. His work on the GUI was put into the Mac, Smalltalk directly influenced Objective-C, and the Dynabook is clearly a predecessor to the iPad. I don't think VPRI is a similar vehicle for new work.

It's a really tough dichotomy: people who invent world-changing things very rarely have the skills (or desire) to spend years polishing and shipping. I think almost all of academia is great example of this, where invention is praised over innovation.

I'm not saying this is bad. Researchers excel at doing research, and should focus in that domain. But papers and conference talks don't change the world. It takes real products, which are the result of substantial non-idea work. Even Doug Engelbart's famous demo took decades to actually build at scale.

One of the most important things about PARC may have been that it was a pairing of research-like projects with real world engineering accomplishments. For several years, I've felt like Google is on the verge of this as well. Glass may be their first shipping experimental product, so we'll see.

It'd be interesting if Alan took a research position at Google. Hal Abelson (inventor of Scheme, founder of Creative Commons, prof at MIT, etc.) spent a sabbatical there and shipped App Inventor for Android, which essentially took ideas from the Scratch programming environment and made them work for Android. Something like Smalltalk on top of App Engine could be really awesome.

    When the Mac first came out, Newsweek asked me what I [thought] 
    of it. I said: Well, it’s the first personal computer worth 
    criticizing. So at the end of the presentation, Steve came up 
    to me and said: Is the iPhone worth criticizing? And I said: 
    Make the screen five inches by eight inches, and you’ll rule the world.

    -- Alan Kay

Why would it help to have Smalltalk on an opaque, proprietary server platform which absolutely locks in every project that is coded for it?

Where on the web can you run Smalltalk right now? Where is the Heroku/Rails for Squeak?

And before you write it, I'll save you the time. Here's the typical HN response to this question:

    Just go get an EC2 instance and apt-get a bunch of shit and 
    then figure out how to use a CLI to push your code there and 
    add framework dependencies and learn Postgres and and configure it 
    for DNS and oh and you probably need a credit card. Not that 
    hard, srsly guys. Also, Dropbox is just git with a shiny frontend.

There is an unfathomably monumental difference between not being able to do something at all, and doing it in a way that is constricted and limited from the perspective of an expert. It's the most dramatic in terms of learning, exploration, experimentation, and imagination.

Lego Mindstorms was proprietary and I loved the shit out of that-- probably was the primary reason I dove into science and engineering. And to your point, everything I built with Lego was (literally) locked into the Lego world. But by the time it actually mattered, I had moved to a legit machine shop. But those plastic blocks laid the foundation for construction. That's what I really want Alan Kay's work to do: lay a new foundation for teaching people how to think about computation and symbolic manipulation with computers.

Have you ever heard of AppScale?

Not many people know this, but the iPhone was a stop-gap on the way to developing the iPad. I know a chap who was on the iPad R&D team, as an intern, before the iPhone came out.

You don't need an insider, Steve was saying it publicly years ago:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2010/06/jobs-the-ipad-begat-the...

It's also detailed in Jobs' biography.

It's funny how various folk cite Alan Kay's Dynabook "vision" but plenty of people had this "vision" (witness the "prior art" for the iPad in 2001 or Hari Seldon's electronic notepad in Isaac Asimov's "Foundation"). Steve Jobs was designing notebooks and tablets on a sketchpad when the Mac was being developed. Bill Atkinson had a similar "vision" which led to his developing HyperCard (because it could be done at the time).

Get your history straight:

"In 1968 — three years before the invention of the microprocessor — Alan Kay stumbled across Don Bitzer's early flat-panel display. Its resolution was 16 pixels by 16 pixels — an impressive improvement over their earlier 4 pixel by 4 pixel display. Alan saw those 256 glowing orange squares, and he went home, and he picked up a pen, and he drew a picture of a goddamn iPad. And then he chased that carrot through decades of groundbreaking research, much of which is responsible for the hardware and software that you're currently reading this with."

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

Alan Kay is the goddamn Carl Friedrich Gauss of Interaction Design (Leonhard Euler was already taken by Douglas Engelbart).

Go read "Foundation" by Isaac Asimov and note the description of Hari Seldon's notepad. I believed it was written in the 50s, but Wikipedia says 1942. (Maybe 1942 refers to a short story that became part of it.)

In WWII Douglas Engelbart was trained as a radar operator. After WWII he is exposed to computers (driven by punchcards and tape, and emitting printed output) and immediately thinks "these should interact via cathode ray tubes".

It seems to me that anyone with imagination who could grok what a computer was immediately imagined the computer being embedded in any information device they could think of -- whether it's a watch, a notepad, a telephone, or the human brain.

The "light pen" was invented in 1952. Do you think the inventor's "vision" was that it be part of a monstrously big, complex, and expensive piece of hardware? (Do you think he/she hadn't read "Foundation"?)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_pen

Alan Kay has done many amazing things, we don't need to fight about this specific thing.

Writing science fiction is one thing, pursuing your vision and getting it made into a reality is entirely another. But you're right - we are probably more in agreement than disagreement.

I was mainly overreacting to the original article which is excessively worshipful. It's hard to argue against Alan Kay's importance, but likewise Donald Knuth, Engelbart, and Kernighan (among the living). All these guys relentlessly pursued pieces of the vision that makes the Macbook Pro I'm typing this on possible. The visible form factor is, I think, almost the least important (and most obvious) pieces of the puzzle. After all, the typewriter and the notepad are the same form factors as my laptop/PC and iPad.

Not that funny -- it was Alan's dissertation, a quite serious work, and it was done in... 1968!

In fact, you could say it was his push for the Dynabook that helped usher in the personal computer as well as WYSIWYG, etc.

When Alan Kay started grad school at Utah, he was handed a bunch of papers on SketchPad, which was done in 1963 :) So the dominoes started falling...SketchPad inspires both Smalltalk and GUI computing.

Do you know of any modern attempts at SketchPad?

There is a Squeak-based faithful recreation of Sketchpad at around 12:30 in Alan Kay's talk here: http://amturing.acm.org/acm_tcc_webcasts.cfm.

The tech startup system was for monetizing publicly-funded research. As I understand, you don't get funding for competing with companies in industry. At least I read things from people like Knuth, who mentioned that a company was angry that TeX was backed by public funding and competed with their product.

Many academics do desire to build product. But would they get funding? Maybe someone in academia could chime in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com