[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
http://www.windley.com/archives/2006/02/alan_kay_is_com.shtml
Much of what is wrong about our field is that many of the ideas that happened before 1975 are still the current paradigm.
That's because that's the engineering part. Order statistics, basic data structures, etc. First he complains the basics haven't changed, then he complains there aren't any basics. I don't understand.
One of Alan’s undergraduate degrees is in molecular biology. He can’t understand it anymore despite having tried to review new developments every few years.
And if one of your undergraduate degrees in the 80s is compiler construction, CPU hardware construction, or networking, you're not going to understand more than the basics today, either. Hands up for everyone in the 80's that learned about trace trees as a way of optimizing code? Anyone had distributed hash trees in their data structures course in the 80s? Skip graphs as a distributed substitute for balanced trees? What does he think the whole RISC/CISC thing was about? What does he think of the work on the Singularity OS and its supporting languages?
Nothing exciting about data structures? He's the doctor who doesn't read up on new cures and thus thinks things have stagnated.
The future five years out is easy to predict because all of the forces acting on computer science are trying to keep it the same as it is now. Likely, the future will be more of what we have now.
Everyone, hands up if you live in a house that has major innovations compared to the one your parents lived in.
Engineers should read a book about how the Empire State building was done. Including the demolition of the building on the site before, the Empire State building was built in 11 months by 3000 people. We don’t know how to do this in computing.
Sure. Now that it's all finished, make sure it's possible to add a couple extra stories between 27 and 28, because one of their businesses want all their employees right next to each other. Oh, and make the stairwells a bit wider, a couple extra feet, because we expect more traffic.
The engineering part of software is well in hand. I can go down to Fry's and buy a disk duplicator for like $200 that doesn't even need any (additional) computer. *That* is software engineering today. It's the *design* that is difficult.
Try to imagine a computing system that will be working 90 years from now? It’s impossible to imagine.
He seems to have missed the part that we've had a world-wide network running since routers were made of protein that has never gone offline in many decades. It's a business thing. You just have to plan for it.
If we were scientists, we’d be trying to build models.
The scientists *are* building models. The models are called OOP, and AOP, and virtual machines with detailed metadata, and stuff like that. He's either too close to it, or too far away.
We build finite artifacts, but the degrees of freedom grow faster than we can reason about them. Thus, we’re left with debugging.
And we build systems that 50 years ago would have been utterly inconceivable and 20 years ago would have been impossible to run and nowadays are off-the-shelf components. 15 years ago, a spelling checker was a major feat of engineering.
This is based on what children do with his system, Squeak.
Which, oddly enough, is almost identical to Smalltalk-80 in all important ways, which pretty much sums it up right there. "I stopped trying to learn new stuff in the 80's, and surprisingly, it's not hard to keep up with all the new developments that happened before the 80's."
I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay, but he seems to be missing the point. Maybe cool stuff in computers just doesn't get popularized like cool stuff in astronomy and biology.
-- Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST) -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
