Alan Kay Decries the State of Computing

gnaremooz writes "Computer pioneer Alan Kay (DARPA in the '60s, PARC in the '70s, now HP Labs) declares 'The sad truth is that 20 years or so of commercialization have almost completely missed the point of what personal computing is about.' He believes that PCs should be tools for creativity and learning, and they are falling short."

Comments

Croquet

[lukeduff]

In techie terms, he is working on an infinitely scalable system for "real-time immersive collaboration done entirely as peer-to-peer machines."

He's probably talking about Croquet which is a 3d collaborative environment developed on top of Squeak. Impressive stuff.

Re:Arrgh..

[RevAaron]

I'm not talking about Smalltalk. I'm talking about Squeak. RTA.

I've no acronym for this, but Know What You're Talking About (KWYTA?). Squeak *is* Smalltalk. It's not the only Smalltalk dialect there is, but it the fastest growing Smalltalk, the Smalltalk with the biggest online community around it.

If you run a LOGO implementation, written in C, on top of your Linux/X11 box, you don't say that "C is nothing but LOGO," or "Man, leenux suxors, all you can do is play with LOGO" do you? You can use Squeak in a number of ways. You can use the eToys scripting system, which is what I assume you are thinking of as modernized LOGO. Or, if for some reason you feel more "adult" doing so, you can write the GUI in all of your apps in a purely programmatic way. Or, you could do what most Squeakers do- just get the job done in the way that makes sense.

Re:Arrgh..

[I_M_Noman]

On the Newton, you could enter 'lunch with Mariah' and the Newton would connect the name with that person's entry in the address book. 10 years later, my Palm still can't do that. Nor can my PC

Actioneer has been available for Palm for ages, and now I see there's a desktop version as well.

Re:Squeak - Not intuitive

[RevAaron]

Squeak isn't all that hard to figure out. But if you're used to having a nicely written book, you can buy one- a couple exist for Squeak specifically. But Squeak's online documentation is lacking, there's no doubt about that- especially in the area of newbie reorientation. Making apps in Squeak is different than making apps in Java, C++ or even Lisp. The environment's different for one.

The basic idea for creating a program in Squeak is to open up the Class Browser. Make a new class. Code away. Depending on what your program does, you may need more than one class.

Or, you can make apps without doing it the old fashioned way. In Squeak, you can draw up your GUI, composing it with widgets out of the Morphic Toolbox, and then adding scripts. When this button is clicked, do this or that. Etc. There are some good tutorials for this newer way of making programs.

It is an (not *the*- anything can be improved) ideal environment for kids- when you've got people teaching them. People used to coding in the same form for a long time often have a hard time learning Squeak. But then again, a lot of old assembly and C hackers have a hard time doing C++ or Java without spending a lot of time thinking about how to design OO systems instead of procedural ones. But old dogs can learn new tricks.

I learned Smalltalk and Squeak on my own, teaching it to myself. I had no problem doing it. Didn't have a text book- or any book, for that matter. While there were even fewer online docs back in those days, that's where I started, but then moving to mostly exploring the system. In Smalltalk, you have the Class Browser, which allows one to browse the source code to anything in the system. I learned by example and by doing. So far, that's how I've learned every language I know, and doing it by just reading books doesn't work for me. When I wanted to know how to make a GUI, I looked at the source of the simplest built-in apps in Squeak, learning how a GUI was constructed. Then making something simple of my own, a simple Address Book. After that point, it's just a matter of checking the reference- that is, looking at the class hierarchy and for the methods that are provided.

I think some personality types don't take well to this kind of exploratory programming, prefering to learn in a more passive way. That's fine- to each her own. Squeak tends to draw folks that do like that style of learning and doing. When it's learned, it is really handy. "Learning" Java for me didn't take that long, and it's mostly a matter of having the on-line class reference handy for me to write a program. In the best case, Squeak would provide more documentation for those who learned to program the old fashioned way, but in any OSS community, no one wants to be the one to write such docs. :P