HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ david927

In a hundred years, when people look at our industry, only a few names will be remembered. Alan Kay is one of those names. He's one of our few living Mozarts and here he is, again, telling us how pathetic it all is, and it would insult anyone with honor but sadly, we have no honor to insult. How can we sleep at night, knowing some of our best and brightest are working on better ways for people to share pictures of their cats? And they build that cat-photo-sharing site in HTML with CSS, which alone is like taking a tour of the worst of the 1980's. I would laugh but I, for one, am ashamed.

⬐ EdwardCoffin

A transcript, near as I could make out:

"I have a slide saying computer science is an oxymoron, software engineering is an oxymoron. This has turned into a pop culture. Because it's a pop culture that is incurious about the past and actually incurious about the future. Is only curious about establishing one zone identity by doing little paintings on the wall.

"Any real science like physics would throw out anybody who didn't know what Newton did. And we very much have a Newton and a Galileo kind of startup forty and fifty years ago that almost nobody who's a practitioner today actually understands any detail [of], even to criticize, they don't know what's good and what's bad because, in the phrase I made up, they're too busy trying to reinvent the flat tire.

"It used to be we'd get after people for re-inventing the wheel. Now we'd love for the computer people to be able to reinvent the wheel ... but for God's sake, don't reinvent the flat tire, because you're actually taking us back. The browser removes WYSIWYG. Hardly anybody complained, but in fact it went back to a mode of editing and thinking about things that's 1965 and before. Hardly anybody complained, because hardly anybody [was] sophisticated enough to have the perspective to complain.

"So I believe the phenomenon that has [?] what has happened to the NLS ideas over the years is actually a wider phenomenon, it's one that is grounded in a much simpler, much weaker conception of life."

⬐ EdwardCoffin

Correction: in the first paragraph "one zone identity" should be "one's own identity".

⬐ da02

Thanks! Taking the time out to post that really means a lot. It's nice to know I'm not the only person who enjoys listening to these types of presentations and ideas.

⬐ EdwardCoffin

You're welcome. I transcribed it for my own records, so I could do a text search on "reinventing the flat tire" (yet another Alan Kay bon mot) and find the context. I figured others might as well benefit.