Here’s a pointer to an excellent interview with Alan Kay. As always, Alan shares some deep insights about technology innovation and the willingness to take on risk (he’s not confident in the ability of most organizations to tolerate risk no matter how small the level of funding involved).
Anyone with an interest in the continuing role and development of Smalltalk has had lots to chew on over the past few days.
As part of a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages, Computerworld Australia has published a conversation with Alan Kay about his role in the development of the foundation of much of modern programming today: Smalltalk-80 , Object-Oriented Programming, and modern software development.
The Weekly Squeak: Smalltalk: the past, the present, and the future?
Michael Davies
Thu, 15 Jul 2010 10:00:45 GMT
Here’s a sample of Alan’s thinking :
What are the hurdles to those leaps in personal computing technology and concepts? Are companies attempting to redefine existing concepts or are they simply innovating too slowly?
It s largely about the enormous difference between News and New to human minds. Marketing people really want News (= a little difference to perk up attention, but on something completely understandable and incremental). This allows News to be told in a minute or two, yet is interesting to humans. New means invisible not immediately comprehensible , etc.
So New is often rejected outright, or is accepted only by denaturing it into News . For example, the big deal about computers is their programmability, and the big deal about that is meta .
For the public, the News made out of the first is to simply simulate old media they are already familiar with and make it a little more convenient on some dimensions and often making it less convenient in ones they don t care about (such as the poorer readability of text on a screen, especially for good readers).
For most computer people, the News that has been made out of New eliminates most meta from the way they go about designing and programming.
One way to look at this is that we are genetically much better set up to cope than to learn. So familiar-plus-pain is acceptable to most people.
Alan can occasionally be a bit cryptic, but that’s because he assumes that you will do your share of the thinking when you listen to what he has to say.
