Alan Kay - Programming and Scaling

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Strong rec unimpressive · 2016-10 · on “Ask HN: What's your favorite tech talk?”

These aren't necessarily my absolute favorite talks, but they're great mind-altering talks a little off the beaten path so I'd like to highlight them: "Writing A Thumb Drive From Scratch" by Travis Goodspeed - [LINK] Excellent talk on the hardware side of security, goes into some really cool theoretical hard disk defense stuff, incredibly insightful and introduces a hardware security tech toy so fun you'll want to go out and order it the moment you're done watching. The speaker is entertaining as all heck to boot. "Programming and Scaling" by Alan Kay - [this video] Interesting talk on the theoretical limits of code size and engineering versus tinkering. Also talks a lot about Alan Kay's philosop

Strong rec espeed · 2018-10 · on “Soup – Alan Kay on Objects”

This is one of my favorite Alan Kay talks of all time (I think this is the right version, but at the time it wasn't on YouTube)... Programming and Scaling - Alan Kay [this video] There's also one where he discusses anthropology and the human universals, but the title of that talk has escaped me for years. Anyone remember what that one's called?

Strong rec neuralkoi · 2026-07 · on “Ask HN: Any New Computer Ideas?”

Check out Alan Kay's perspective on this [0]. This talk is excellent and will cue you in on how to go about thinking about the fact that the way we program and view and understand computers, with the exception of recent advances in neural networks/LLMs, has followed largely unchanged for the past 65 or so years. [0] [this video]

Recommends gambler · 2020-10 · on “Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)”

Reminds me of some Alan Kay talks: [this video] He actually mentions the book that is the source for the first illustration in the article. He also often talks about the speed of molecules and how it's counter-intuitive to the commonplace idea of cell operation. Cell biology was an inspiration for original OOP (which wasn't much like Java/C++ at all). When reading about Covid stuff and immunity, I often think how these mechanism could be imitated in engineering. I definitely believe there are some general principles that we could benefit from without trying to "simulate" biology. Edit: Sorry, same author/illustrator, but different book.

Cites pascient · 2016-06 · on “Alan Kay has agreed to do an AMA today”

Hi Alan, You mentioned Bob Barton's lecture a few times [1], emphasizing the role he played in debunking some of your (and his own) ideas about computing. Could you touch on some dogmas that haven't yet been evoked in this thread or in your videos on YouTube ? Either from the 70's or today. Let me link to Ted Nelson's remarks about the tradition of files/lumps [2] for a start. Bullet-point may not be the ideal form for an answer but feel free to get away with that :) [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]

Cites armitron · 2017-05 · on “Lisp, Smalltalk, and the Power of Symmetry (2014)”

You're all over the place here and your arguments make no sense whatsoever when examined. First, you conflate mass-appeal with some sort of objective "better" criterion which is of course bonkers. To use one of your own examples against you, there are hundreds of thousands of Java monkeys out there that are using glue other people made to tie together rocks to build stonewalls. Which do fail as soon as the weather stops being nice. Security (you should look into Java deserialization bugs), reliability, performance what do they know about any of these things? Second, you conflate late-binding as present in Lisp and Smalltalk with late-binding present in other dynamic languages. The two are no

Cites NotUsingLinux · 2017-08 · on “Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System”

Hi Josh, You raise some interesting points in your article. I wonder how to comment or discuss this the most efficient way (here or elsewhere?) Some questions: Have you looked at haiku? What you describe as modules, I think Alan Kay calls "objects" in the smalltalk/Xerox tradition. Have you looked at his research project: STEPS reinventing programming? [this video] Some bits and parts of this is open source. Imagine a full system running on 10000 LoC I think this could be a step forward. Also this blurs if not throws away the distinction between "desktop and web(remote)" applications. Because if integration of remote objects is sandboxed but still transparent you get improved usability. Also I th

Cites gambler · 2018-11 · on “Google Tried to Patent My Work After a Job Interview”

It's a thing of its own. Used to be called informatics in some countries. Much better name, IMO. There are large parts of computer science that have nothing to do with computers. They're about information and can be applied outside of computers. I'm with Alan Kay when he says "computer science" used to be an aspiration and eventually became a misnomer. Same with software engineering. [this video] (Doesn't mean CS and SE are always "worse" than science and engineering. But they are currently very different.)