A great Alan Kay quote

G

Grant Edwards

In an interview at http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273
Alan Kay said something I really liked, and I think it applies
equally well to Python as well as the languages mentioned:

I characterized one way of looking at languages in this
way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features
or they're a crystallization of style. Languages such as
APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style
languages, where there's a real center and imputed style to
how you're supposed to do everything.

I think that "a crystallization of style" sums things up nicely.
The rest of the interview is pretty interesting as well.
 
J

James

Surely

"Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then
being a real problem in the longer term."

is better lol ;)
 
G

Grant Edwards

Surely

"Perl is another example of filling a tiny, short-term need, and then
being a real problem in the longer term."

is better lol ;)

That was the other one I really liked, and Perl was the first
language I thought of when I saw the phrase "agglutination of
features". C++ was the second one.
 
F

Francis Girard

"""
Today he is Senior Fellow at Hewlett-Packard Labs and president of Viewpoints
Research Institute, a nonprofit organization whose goal is to change how
children are educated by creating a sample curriculum with supporting media
for teaching math and science. This curriculum will use Squeak as its media,
and will be highly interactive and constructive. Kay’s deep interests in
children and education have been the catalysts for many of his ideas over the
years.
"""

I love him.

It's also interesting to see GUIs with windows, mouse (etc.), which apparently
find their origin in is mind, probably comes from the desire to introduce
computers to children.

Francis Girard

Le mercredi 9 Février 2005 20:29, Grant Edwards a écrit :
 
P

Peter Hansen

Grant said:
In an interview at http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273
Alan Kay said something I really liked, and I think it applies
equally well to Python as well as the languages mentioned:

I characterized one way of looking at languages in this
way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features
or they're a crystallization of style. Languages such as
APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style
languages, where there's a real center and imputed style to
how you're supposed to do everything.

I think that "a crystallization of style" sums things up nicely.
The rest of the interview is pretty interesting as well.

Then Perl is an "agglutination of styles", while Python might
be considered a "crystallization of features"...

-Peter
 
?

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Fran=E7ois?= Pinard

[Peter Hansen]
Then Perl is an "agglutination of styles", while Python might
be considered a "crystallization of features"...

Grosso modo, yes. Yet, we should recognise that Python agglutinated
a few crystals in the recent years. :)

It gave up some of its purity for practical reasons. We got rather far
from the "There is only one way to do it!" that once was Python motto.
 
P

Peter Hansen

François Pinard said:
[Peter Hansen]

Then Perl is an "agglutination of styles", while Python might
be considered a "crystallization of features"...


Grosso modo, yes. Yet, we should recognise that Python agglutinated
a few crystals in the recent years. :)

It gave up some of its purity for practical reasons. We got rather far
from the "There is only one way to do it!" that once was Python motto.

I would call a "pure" language one that had a crystallized style.

Python, on the other hand, is just plain practical. Thus my
half-humorous attempt at defining it in terms of the features
(with its wide-ranging library and extension modules) rather
than in termso of its style (which as you know can range
from procedural to functional, stopping briefly at object
oriented and "newbie" along the way ;-) ).

-Peter
 
H

has

Grant said:
In an interview at http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=273
Alan Kay said something I really liked, and I think it applies
equally well to Python as well as the languages mentioned:

I characterized one way of looking at languages in this
way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features
or they're a crystallization of style

I'd say Python is somewhere in the middle, though moving slowly towards
'agglutination' in the last couple years.

The rest of the interview is pretty interesting as well.

Excellent link, thanks.
 
J

Jeremy Bowers

I'd say Python is somewhere in the middle, though moving slowly towards
'agglutination' in the last couple years.

But it feels really badly about that and promises to kick the habit
somewhere around the year 3000.
 
S

Scott David Daniels

Francis said:
...
It's also interesting to see GUIs with windows, mouse (etc.), which apparently
find their origin in is mind, probably comes from the desire to introduce
computers to children.

OK, presuming "origin in is mind" was meant to say "origin in his mind,"
I'd like to stick up for Doug Engelbart (holds the patent on the mouse)
here. I interviewed with his group at SRI in the ancient past, when
they were working on the "Augmentation Research" project -- machine
augmentation of human intelligence. They, at the time, were working on
input pointing devices and hadn't yet settled. The helmet that read
brain waves was doing astoundingly well (90% correct on up, down, left,
right, don't move), but nowhere near well enough to use for positioning
on edits. This work produced the mouse, despite rumors of Xerox Parc or
Apple inventing the mouse.

Xerox Parc, did, as far as I understand, do the early development on
interactive graphic display using a mouse for positioning on a
graphics screen. Engelbart's mouse navigated on a standard 80x24
character screen.

Augment did real research on what might work, with efforts to measure
ease of use and reliability. They did not simply start with a good
(or great) guess and charge forward. They produced the mouse, and the
earliest "linked" documents that I know of.

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

--Scott David Daniels
(e-mail address removed)
 
C

Cameron Laird

.
[thoroughly appropriate
focus on Engelbart and
his Augment colleagues]
.
.
(or great) guess and charge forward. They produced the mouse, and the
earliest "linked" documents that I know of.

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html
.
.
.
I entirely agree that Engelbart deserves full recognition for his
achievements. At the same time, I think we also should note that
Ted Nelson was publishing articles about "hypertext" in '65, and
Vannevar Bush lucidly explained his vision for textual linking in
'45. With a little provocation, I can push the ideas of "mechanical"
or "machine" referencing back at least to the Enlightenment, and
arguably much farther.
 
A

Arthur

I love him.

I don't.
It's also interesting to see GUIs with windows, mouse (etc.), which apparently
find their origin in is mind, probably comes from the desire to introduce
computers to children.


Alfred Bork, now
Professor Emeritus
Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine 92697

had written an article in 1980 called

"Interactive Learning" which began

"We are at the onset of a major revolution in education, a revolution
unparalleled since the invention of the printing press. The computer
will be the instrument of this revolution."

In 2000 he published:

"Interactive Learning: Twenty Years Later"

looking back on his orignal article and its optimistic predictions and
admitting "I was not a very good prophet"

What went wrong?

Among other things he points (probably using a pointing device) at the
pointing device

"""
Another is the rise of the mouse as a computer device. People had the
peculiar idea that one could deal with the world of learning purely by
pointing.

"""
The articles can be found here:

http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss4/seminal.cfm

One does not need to agree or disagree, it seems to me about this or
that point on interface, or influence, or anything else. What one does
need to do is separate hope from actuality, and approach the entire
subject area with some sense of what is at stake, and with some true
sense of the complexity of the issues, in such a way that at this
stage of the game the only authentic stance is one of humility,

Kay fails the humility test, dramatically. IMO.

Art
 
A

alex23

jfj said:
Bah. My impressions from the interview was "there are no good
languages anymore. In my time we made great languages, but today
they all suck. Perl for example...."

That was kind of what I took from it as well. Don't get me wrong, I've
a lot of respect for Kay's contributions...he just doesn't understand
that there's *more* to a language than it's adherence to his ideas of
'best'. His arguments are literally academic.

Decrying contemporary choices for their "pop" nature kinda sounds like
the ugly kid devaluing the importance of the school dance.

It just wasn't fit enough to survive, Alan. Let it go.

- alex23
 
F

Francis Girard

Thank you.

Francis Girard

Le jeudi 10 Février 2005 02:48, Scott David Daniels a écrit :
 
F

Francis Girard

Le jeudi 10 Février 2005 04:37, Arthur a écrit :
I don't.


Alfred Bork, now
Professor Emeritus
Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine 92697

had written an article in 1980 called

"Interactive Learning" which began

"We are at the onset of a major revolution in education, a revolution
unparalleled since the invention of the printing press. The computer
will be the instrument of this revolution."

In 2000 he published:

"Interactive Learning: Twenty Years Later"

looking back on his orignal article and its optimistic predictions and
admitting "I was not a very good prophet"

What went wrong?

Among other things he points (probably using a pointing device) at the
pointing device

"""
Another is the rise of the mouse as a computer device. People had the
peculiar idea that one could deal with the world of learning purely by
pointing.

"""
The articles can be found here:

http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss4/seminal.cfm

One does not need to agree or disagree, it seems to me about this or
that point on interface, or influence, or anything else. What one does
need to do is separate hope from actuality, and approach the entire
subject area with some sense of what is at stake, and with some true
sense of the complexity of the issues, in such a way that at this
stage of the game the only authentic stance is one of humility,

Kay fails the humility test, dramatically. IMO.

I think I've been enthouasistic too fast. While reading the article I grew
more and more uncomfortable with sayings like :

- Intel and Motorola don't know how to do micro-processors and did not
understand anything in our own architecture
- Languages of today are features filled doggy bags
- Java failed where I succeeded
- I think beautifully like a mathematician while the rest is pop culture
- etc.

I'm not sure at all he likes Python. Python is too pragmmatic for him. And its
definition does not hold in the palm of his hand.

I think he's a bit nostalgic.

Francis Girard
or
 
J

jfj

Peter said:
Then Perl is an "agglutination of styles", while Python might
be considered a "crystallization of features"...

Bah. My impressions from the interview was "there are no good
languages anymore. In my time we made great languages, but today
they all suck. Perl for example...."
I got the impressions that the interview is as bad for python
as for perl and any of the languages of the 90's and 00's.

From the interview:
""" You could think of it as putting a low-pass filter on some of the
good ideas from the ’60s and ’70s, as computing spread out much, much
faster than educating unsophisticated people can happen. In the last 25
years or so, we actually got something like a pop culture, similar to
what happened when television came on the scene and some of its
inventors thought it would be a way of getting Shakespeare to the
masses. But they forgot that you have to be more sophisticated and have
more perspective to understand Shakespeare. What television was able to
do was to capture people as they were.

So I think the lack of a real computer science today, and the lack of
real software engineering today, is partly due to this pop culture.
"""

So, let's not be so self-important <winkus>, and see this interview
as one who bashes perl and admires python. It aint. Python is pop
culture according to Mr Kay. I'll leave the rest to slashdot..


jfj
 
C

Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou

I entirely agree that Engelbart deserves full recognition for his
achievements. At the same time, I think we also should note that
Ted Nelson was publishing articles about "hypertext" in '65, and
Vannevar Bush lucidly explained his vision for textual linking in
'45. With a little provocation, I can push the ideas of "mechanical"
or "machine" referencing back at least to the Enlightenment, and
arguably much farther.

Like Áíôéêýèçñá
 
C

Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou

[more snipping]
With a little provocation, I can push the ideas of "mechanical"
or "machine" referencing back at least to the Enlightenment, and
arguably much farther.

Please ignore my earlier post, since it was mistakenly sent incomplete.

about "arguably much farther":

http://www.ancient-mysteries.com/greece2000/Main/Main2/Main3/Anti-Main/anti-main.html

and

http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/battery2.html

and

http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/steamengine2.html


Nice page, this:

http://www.smith.edu/hsc/museum/ancient_inventions/hsclist.htm
 

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