Keynote: Making Progress — Alan Kay

Dr. Alan Kay delivers the opening keynote of ETE 2021.

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[SDP-ytoq]

Holy cow, this talk is chock full of goodies. Alan Kay's constructivist leanings vis a vis learning and cognitive development clearly influence and influenced much of his work.

[cookiemonster]

This talk led me down to many rabbit holes. In a good way.

[MilanZimmermann]

Beautiful talk, with historical context and poweful takeaways. Alan's note on liveness to pick one at the end

[AlexandriaRohn]

Question & Answer portion

51:44 What are your thoughts on the progress of UI's in the last 20 years? Specifically apps moving from native to browsers.
First, the best exercise any software engineer can go through is to see how they can criticize the web & browser in a way that has objectivity to it. It's actually one of the worst designs in computing.
Second, although the overall interface is much worse. The UI isn't just access to controls. It's something you need to be able to explore, to try things & recover from.

55:41 What's it mean for a language to be interactive vs non-interactive?

[jorisvanderkwast]

Lovely talk, and it reminds me of how I dealt as consumer of IT. I self taught, and I studied agriculture, which is a modified form of micro biology. It's studying a system, but also has effects. You can't project the input, in this case the weather. But you can think of different scenario's. I don't program a lot, I script, tying systems toghether. I never did look into software much, mostly hardware. But as I found out, hardware is tricky. What is a pi? We often choose a path where we say, we can do it, so let's; Not thinking should interesting that hardware and software got apart, save us billions in a philosophical thought....?

[AlexandriaRohn]

34:00 Too much of software is people tinkering. The aesthetics is people loving their tinkering too much. And occasionally some engineering. After 40 years of this, we need something novel that goes beyond what we have now.

[RoelBaardman]

I wonder if any good examples of "publish subscribe done well" exist?
Linda looks really interesting, but I wonder if it scales to internet scale?
To me NDN appears to be a step in the right direction, although I wonder if a global hierarchical namespace is really what we want.

[SimGunther]

48:32 We also CURRENTLY have a president AND group of employees in office doing the same thing

[jpenneymrcoin]

"the software must not harm or fail"
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

I so wish the industry operated with this viewpoint. Whoo.

How about : "the software must not cost anything and all errors must be hidden from upper management"?