HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ gjvc

See also http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D9DC82D997454711A71B586E...

Alan Kay talking about agent-oriented computing in 1990:

https://youtu.be/275FQ9koAw8?t=7647

Very interesting view, especially considering how long ago that was and how relevant they still are.

⬐ protomyth

That's pretty good, hadn't seen that clip. I think the pervasive networking mentioned has enabled the paradigm but wasn't quite the driver Kay thought it would be. RPCs (of some type) over HTTP have won over having mobile code. On the other hand, I still see a big upside in using agents for their deployment and component (in the divisible whole sense) organization of software.

⬐ vram22

Some time after Java first came out, there was a product called Voyager from a Java products company called Objectspace [1]. Voyager was a product for creating and using mobile agents. I had downloaded the trial and tried it out a bit. It was quite cool. IIRC, Graham Glass, who was involved in ObjectSpace, was also the creator of Electric XML, an XML library, and was later CTO of WebObjects. Recently he had/has been working on EDU 2.0 (EDU20.org), an e-learning product company.

[1] They were also the creators of JGL, the Java Generics Library, which was like a Java version of the C++ STL, and done before Java got generics natively.

⬐ zengid

I can't remember where it is (somewhere in the middle), but I like the part where Alan Kay describes (paraphrasing) programming languages as 'Idealized machines', and that if we layer ideal machines on top of each other it increases the pleasure of programming at the cost of performance.

⬐ lloydde

There is a full transcript at the video's home: http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_D9DC82D997454711A71B586E...

My favorite:

Interviewer: DID [institutional model / one or two runs a day] PUT MANY PEOPLE OFF COMPUTING?

Kay: I don't think so. I think you, you know the happiness is the how much expectations you know, the reality exceeds expectations.

⬐ mikekchar

Or about 5 minutes in:

'So for instance, John McCarthy, who is a professor at MIT both wrote memos suggesting we should time-share the computer, and he also thought more into the future that we'd be all networked together, and there would be these huge information utilities it would be like our power and lighting utilities that would give us the entire wealth of the knowledge of man, and he suggested on that what we'd have to have is something like an intelligent agent. An entity not maybe as smart as us, but an expert in finding things, and we would have to give it advice. He called it the "advice-taker."'

Of course the interviewer brought the interview back on track with the next question ;-)

⬐ eschutte2

I love this bit (about 48 minutes in, talking about Aldus Manutius):

KAY: this notion that a computer can be lost is not one that we like yet. we protect our computers. we bolt them to the desk, and so forth.

INT: because they're still quite valuable.

KAY: still quite... expensive. they'll be really valuable when we can lose them.