Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing(notion.so)
notion.so
Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing
https://www.notion.so/blog/alan-kay
39 comments
I love it because it reframes the process to be as high-tech and as ultra-modern as they could make it at the time.
> They're all about this idea, which most programmers have that's wrong, is that you're going to write the program the right way. Nothing's going to be wrong. The whole idea is to make a fucking mess.
I think he's great and I've learned a lot from him, but this is where I immediately disagreed. But it got me thinking and I realized it's because the stuff I work on is mostly a solved problem. So I think people that reimplement stuff that already exists have this schtick about making it correctly, clean and efficient. He was mostly working on things really new so it had to be a mess. I just hate that the stuff I work on is a mess anyway even though it's nothing special at all.
I think he's great and I've learned a lot from him, but this is where I immediately disagreed. But it got me thinking and I realized it's because the stuff I work on is mostly a solved problem. So I think people that reimplement stuff that already exists have this schtick about making it correctly, clean and efficient. He was mostly working on things really new so it had to be a mess. I just hate that the stuff I work on is a mess anyway even though it's nothing special at all.
Oh I very strongly resonated with that! This was one of the two quotes I wrote down from the interview. One thing I notice when I see artists works or when I'm working on an artistic project of my own is that the project is absolutely ugly for 80% of the process. It takes a lot of changing, tweaking, adjustments, and sometimes also an unreasonable amount of fine detail work to get something that looks good; and then a ton more work to get something that looks great. That's what he means by "mess" I think; all projects should start as a mess, and develop/grow/iterate into something more beautiful.
I find programmers tend to operate less iteratively, and more like engineering, where you need to come up with a good solution before implementing it, because in engineering you can't undo, and costs are high to make changes after a certain point. The analogy I like is: programming is often compared to engineering/construction, but is perhaps better represented by gardening; it's got a much more organic nature and flexibility.
I find programmers tend to operate less iteratively, and more like engineering, where you need to come up with a good solution before implementing it, because in engineering you can't undo, and costs are high to make changes after a certain point. The analogy I like is: programming is often compared to engineering/construction, but is perhaps better represented by gardening; it's got a much more organic nature and flexibility.
It happens that you don't get the insight into how to do something right until after you've made a few messes. I think Kay takes the view that the act of generating that insight is ultimately more valuable than the act of producing any one particular software artefact.
Because for the PARC folks from back in the day, the true vision for personal computing was to enable lots of people to do new things. That’s why Kay laments that the personal computing revolution is yet to happen.
Now let's apply that insight to the subproblems of your problem. And then to the subproblems of those subproblems.
The way I see it, the tools we use to program - all the way from IDEs through programming languages to the very way we code in plaintext - make the process too damn slow, the feedback loop way too long. Messing around, trying and modifying and retrying until you get something good, it all takes too long, so we hardly do it.
The way I see it, the tools we use to program - all the way from IDEs through programming languages to the very way we code in plaintext - make the process too damn slow, the feedback loop way too long. Messing around, trying and modifying and retrying until you get something good, it all takes too long, so we hardly do it.
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steve yeggie's politican axis of software development comes hard to mind.
https://gist.github.com/cornchz/3313150
at work yeah, we all naturally want a very defensive, safe, territory. we dont want volatility & risk in our running, cash making systems.
it might be helpful to reflect on thr lifecycles of software development. Pioneers, settlers, & town planners comes to mind as a useful model, of the changing approaches as software established itself over time.
https://mobile.twitter.com/swardley/status/10875115450918993...
i'm really really warmed to hear that you were able to put yourself in the shoes of those who came before, those who were charged with building something out of nothing. most of us join fairly established entities, and we do not see the drive-to-make through the strong, powerful point of view of those trying to get create, those trying to get started.
when Alan Kay &all talk about personal computing, to me, it is much more a domain of will & creation & whimsy than the controlled, regularized, predictable processes we aim for when we professionals are building & elaborating our paid, industrial computing work.
at work yeah, we all naturally want a very defensive, safe, territory. we dont want volatility & risk in our running, cash making systems.
it might be helpful to reflect on thr lifecycles of software development. Pioneers, settlers, & town planners comes to mind as a useful model, of the changing approaches as software established itself over time.
https://mobile.twitter.com/swardley/status/10875115450918993...
i'm really really warmed to hear that you were able to put yourself in the shoes of those who came before, those who were charged with building something out of nothing. most of us join fairly established entities, and we do not see the drive-to-make through the strong, powerful point of view of those trying to get create, those trying to get started.
when Alan Kay &all talk about personal computing, to me, it is much more a domain of will & creation & whimsy than the controlled, regularized, predictable processes we aim for when we professionals are building & elaborating our paid, industrial computing work.
An interesting dynamic here is that, having read Yeggie's article years back, I regarded Smalltalk as being somewhere towards the conservative end of the axis (at least, in comparison to other dynamic languages.) E.g.: variables declared before use, no truthiness, very few automatic type conversions. It results in a system with a high degree of internal consistency.
And yet, the goal of the language is to enable activity at the liberal end of the axis.
So maybe there's a more subtle goal: you have to enable someone to make a mess, but also equip them to get out of that mess into something more structured, as and when that becomes useful.
As a counter example, spreadsheets are wonderful for making a messy solution to certain kinds of problems - but how do you then it them into a spreadsheet that isn't a mess? I don't know that I've ever seen that happen - it seems like the right means of abstraction and combination to enable that to happen just don't exist in spreadsheet-land.
And yet, the goal of the language is to enable activity at the liberal end of the axis.
So maybe there's a more subtle goal: you have to enable someone to make a mess, but also equip them to get out of that mess into something more structured, as and when that becomes useful.
As a counter example, spreadsheets are wonderful for making a messy solution to certain kinds of problems - but how do you then it them into a spreadsheet that isn't a mess? I don't know that I've ever seen that happen - it seems like the right means of abstraction and combination to enable that to happen just don't exist in spreadsheet-land.
Fun comment! What are some things you think that Smalltalk does have or does do that embody the liberal sides of the axis? I want to agree, but trying to describe the image based environment, or how being more messages helps, is challenging for me to elaborate on.
Personally, I think we grade really hard on the small but visible differences like "do I have to declare 'MyFoo foo' or is there inference typing &c about", but it's much harder to assess from a big picture what behaviors & differences there are, harder to understand how each language & runtime is going to help us make sense of things.
Spreadsheets are an interesting place to turn to next. I'd be interested to see spreadsheets that can also visualize the dependencies of cells, that show how values flow across the sheet. Having that positional sense is interesting, versus, say, a debugger where you can see maybe what lexical scope a value is from, or less interestingly the address on the heap where a value happens to be. There's still, in both spreadsheet & debugging, dependencies, which power the processing that is now underway. I feel like both environments could be much better at helping explore this.
Personally, I think we grade really hard on the small but visible differences like "do I have to declare 'MyFoo foo' or is there inference typing &c about", but it's much harder to assess from a big picture what behaviors & differences there are, harder to understand how each language & runtime is going to help us make sense of things.
Spreadsheets are an interesting place to turn to next. I'd be interested to see spreadsheets that can also visualize the dependencies of cells, that show how values flow across the sheet. Having that positional sense is interesting, versus, say, a debugger where you can see maybe what lexical scope a value is from, or less interestingly the address on the heap where a value happens to be. There's still, in both spreadsheet & debugging, dependencies, which power the processing that is now underway. I feel like both environments could be much better at helping explore this.
"LAMBDA: The ultimate Excel worksheet function"
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/lambda-the-ult...
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Was this interview edited? If so, it seems to have been badly edited. Listening to the recording, I noticed one part in particular, where he's talking about catalysts in inorganic chemical reactions, and then he's talking about non-trivial engineering artifacts. If you listen closely, it sounds like a bad edit. This is at about 41:48.
Every time Alan Kay speaks, I get smarter.
And I don't mean "smarter" in a ted talk way.
And I don't mean "smarter" in a ted talk way.
He lost me when he started going on about “what’s wrong with our brains”.
I have not given Alan Kay permission to declare me broken.
His computing skills are legend, but he’s not a god.
I have not given Alan Kay permission to declare me broken.
His computing skills are legend, but he’s not a god.
MP3 of the interview is available for one more day on https://huffduffer.com/ivanagas/623584
https://f000.backblazeb2.com/file/huffduff-video/youtube.com...
Such a great interview! Or rather, pontification:
> See, what I'm doing here is I'm not conversing. I really can't converse very well at my age because I've lost my patience. So, what I do is pontificate, which is the same as giving you something like it's written.
> This is why experienced programmers have big multiple screens. They're working on something where the result is going to be fit on one screen, but you have to have all this other stuff, it's like when you make an arch; it's not just piling up the bricks, you have to put this whole scaffolding up. You have to hold everything together until you get the keystone in place. And virtually all of the productivity tools that I've seen, I'll just say, "all" because I haven't seen all of them, but the ones I have seen, they just completely don't understand this at all. They're all about this idea, which most programmers have that's wrong, is that you're going to write the program the right way. Nothing's going to be wrong. The whole idea is to make a fucking mess. And if you look at the way Disney artists do things, the whole thing is messy. This is something anybody in the arts knows completely about, and hardly anybody in computing knows anything about. But in fact, it's a key factor in building a good interactive development environment.
> We were a floor culture at PARC so we not only had the bean bags instead of chairs. Why bean bags? Well, you can't leap to your feet to denounce somebody from a bean bag.
This seemed an odd error: when Alan says (I presume) Feynman, the text has "Feinman" and links to a Richard Feinman.
> See, what I'm doing here is I'm not conversing. I really can't converse very well at my age because I've lost my patience. So, what I do is pontificate, which is the same as giving you something like it's written.
> This is why experienced programmers have big multiple screens. They're working on something where the result is going to be fit on one screen, but you have to have all this other stuff, it's like when you make an arch; it's not just piling up the bricks, you have to put this whole scaffolding up. You have to hold everything together until you get the keystone in place. And virtually all of the productivity tools that I've seen, I'll just say, "all" because I haven't seen all of them, but the ones I have seen, they just completely don't understand this at all. They're all about this idea, which most programmers have that's wrong, is that you're going to write the program the right way. Nothing's going to be wrong. The whole idea is to make a fucking mess. And if you look at the way Disney artists do things, the whole thing is messy. This is something anybody in the arts knows completely about, and hardly anybody in computing knows anything about. But in fact, it's a key factor in building a good interactive development environment.
> We were a floor culture at PARC so we not only had the bean bags instead of chairs. Why bean bags? Well, you can't leap to your feet to denounce somebody from a bean bag.
This seemed an odd error: when Alan says (I presume) Feynman, the text has "Feinman" and links to a Richard Feinman.
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"If the professors of English will complain to me that the students who come to the universities, after all those years of study, still cannot spell 'friend,' I say to them that something's the matter with the way you spell friend." - Richard P. Feynman
The mislink is probably a rushed final editing pass.
The mislink is probably a rushed final editing pass.
Most of the transcripts of computing interviews that I see could use some proofreading by people who know the subject.
> There are so many more rabbit holes I would have liked to go down, but I think we're at our time now. So, thank you so much Alan for coming on the show. This was really fun.
If Alan Kay willing to keep talking, why not keep him talking? You could turn it into a two-parter for whatever the show format is.
If Alan Kay willing to keep talking, why not keep him talking? You could turn it into a two-parter for whatever the show format is.
Although Quora seems widely disdained here, I’d recommend asking him any follow-up questions there, where he’s pretty responsive.
What a fascinating interview, I thought it was going to be all about tech but seems like Alan Kay knows a thing or two about political science as well.
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These notion articles are quite nice imo.
Devon Zuegel is a great thinker in a large breath of subjects ->
On Urbanism:
Her podcast Order without Design [0] where she interviews the Bertaud couple
Fields note on Miami [1] (with beautiful pictures)
Metamuse interview on cities [2]
and a lot more on her blog
On tech :
She was the PM for Github sponsors (and I believe other open-source friendly projects), great interview of her by the changelog [4]
The Pioneer series (of which this interview is an episod), favorites are Louis Pouzing and roundtable about Hamming [5]
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/order-without-design-h...
[1] https://devonzuegel.com/post/field-notes-miami
[2] https://museapp.com/podcast/33-cities/
[3] https://changelog.com/podcast/370
[4] https://www.notion.so/blog/topic/pioneers
On Urbanism:
Her podcast Order without Design [0] where she interviews the Bertaud couple
Fields note on Miami [1] (with beautiful pictures)
Metamuse interview on cities [2]
and a lot more on her blog
On tech :
She was the PM for Github sponsors (and I believe other open-source friendly projects), great interview of her by the changelog [4]
The Pioneer series (of which this interview is an episod), favorites are Louis Pouzing and roundtable about Hamming [5]
[0] https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/order-without-design-h...
[1] https://devonzuegel.com/post/field-notes-miami
[2] https://museapp.com/podcast/33-cities/
[3] https://changelog.com/podcast/370
[4] https://www.notion.so/blog/topic/pioneers
I adore notion and will unironically shill it for them at any appropriate moment.
so, er, yeah. GET NOTION.
so, er, yeah. GET NOTION.
I don't get how people can use notion for personal info or basically anything else if you are not forced to use it at work.
Not even considering that your most personal information (journal, health log etc.) you don't share anywhere else twitter, facebook is stored in plaintext somewhere and can be used however they want according to their privacy policy which some nothing-to-hide folks might ok with but that everything you have written can go poof any second is nuts IMHO.
People want a modern and cool tools with bangs and whistles.
They 'have nothing to hide', they trust 'SaaS' as a collective agreement on "advancement' and 'inevitable mandatory future'.
Corporations want data and control over UX. I see this as a happy relationship between owners with knowledge and slaves with lack of survival instinct.
I can accept some form of work related security risk (Hi, Figma) but in general cannot give my intellectual property and businesses processes on any third party. In my company all the process tools are strictly FOSS and under my control.
Personally speaking, tools as Notion cannot hold a candle on my Emacs org-mode workflow. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every 10 years just to feel "cool" and "modern".
But hey it's a business, they have happy users and money whats more to ask for? Right?
Corporations want data and control over UX. I see this as a happy relationship between owners with knowledge and slaves with lack of survival instinct.
I can accept some form of work related security risk (Hi, Figma) but in general cannot give my intellectual property and businesses processes on any third party. In my company all the process tools are strictly FOSS and under my control.
Personally speaking, tools as Notion cannot hold a candle on my Emacs org-mode workflow. You don't need to reinvent the wheel every 10 years just to feel "cool" and "modern".
But hey it's a business, they have happy users and money whats more to ask for? Right?
> Notion cannot hold a candle on my Emacs org-mode workflow
More details on this? Anywhere I can read up on this.
I like your principle - not to trust these SaaS tools with your personal data.
More details on this? Anywhere I can read up on this.
I like your principle - not to trust these SaaS tools with your personal data.
>Org-mode is characterized by a flexible and versatile system with adaptability to different workflows, making it comparable as an Evernote alternative. It is at once simple and complex., which helps it to compete as an Evernote alternative.
https://www.slant.co/versus/8769/15790/~org-mode_vs_notion
There are a thousand reasons to invest in Emacs and org-mode. It is a personal choice. I like the speed and extendability. It is serious investment and requires remapping of ideas and habbits. But the last thing that I will part of are Emacs and Kynesys Advantage.:)
Company-wise I choose to use this: https://joplinapp.org/
You can always learn about Org-mode: https://www.reddit.com/r/orgmode/
https://www.slant.co/versus/8769/15790/~org-mode_vs_notion
There are a thousand reasons to invest in Emacs and org-mode. It is a personal choice. I like the speed and extendability. It is serious investment and requires remapping of ideas and habbits. But the last thing that I will part of are Emacs and Kynesys Advantage.:)
Company-wise I choose to use this: https://joplinapp.org/
You can always learn about Org-mode: https://www.reddit.com/r/orgmode/
I enjoyed notion but stopped using it mainly due to the bad offline functionality (and occasionally getting randomly logged out).
Has this been improved yet? (Desktop|IOS App)
Has this been improved yet? (Desktop|IOS App)
You should really look at Anytype[1]. It is basically a better version of Notion[2] that uses IPFS and your social network to back up your data.
[1]: https://anytype.io
[2]: because it is offline-first and has things like named relations, so you can connect information in any custom way that you like.
[1]: https://anytype.io
[2]: because it is offline-first and has things like named relations, so you can connect information in any custom way that you like.
No, offline is still almost non-existent.
It's also an amazing hiring ad. Apart from just being a cool and interesting product, stuff like this convinces me that the notion people have their head in the right place. Unfortunately I can't work in the states or I would've applied to them already.
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I always think of it as this old fashioned scroll thing with the weird letter S in it.