Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!floyd!harpo!ihnp4!zehntel!tektronix!hplabs!sri-unix!malis@BBN-UNIX From: malis%BBN-UNIX@sri-unix.UUCP Newsgroups: net.ai Subject: Notes from a talk by Alan Kay (long message) Message-ID: <534@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Sat, 31-Mar-84 08:22:26 EST Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.534 Posted: Sat Mar 31 08:22:26 1984 Date-Received: Mon, 9-Apr-84 05:48:23 EST Lines: 102 From: Andrew Malis [Forwarded from the Info-Atari list by Tyson@SRI-AI.] Date: 23 Mar 1984 1214-EST (Friday) From: mit-athena!dm@mit-eddie (Dave Mankins ) Subject: Notes from talk by Alan Kay at MIT Dr. Alan Kay, one of the developers of Smalltalk and the Xerox Alto, and currently a Vice President and Chief Scientist at Atari, gave a talk at MIT yesterday (22 March 1984) titled: "Too many smart people: a personal view of design in the computer field" The abstract: This talk is about the battle between Form and Content in Design and why "being smart" usually causes content to lose. "Insightful laziness" is better because (1) it takes maximum advantage of others work and (2) it encourages "rotating" the problem into its simplest essence -- often by changing it completely. In other words: Point of view is worth 80 IQ points! Here are some tidbits gleaned from my notes: One of the problems with smart people is that they deal with difficulties by fixing them, rather than taking the difficulty as a symptom of a flaw in the design, and noticing "a rotation into a new simplicity." When preparing his talk he realized that what he wanted to say was basically inconsistent, that 1) You should do things over, and 2) You shouldn't do things over. "Both of these are true as long as you get the boundary conditions right." (There ensues an anecdote about working with Seymour Cray to get an early CDC6500 up at NCAR. The 6500 hardware did not normalize its floating point operations, but that was "okay" because "any sensible model will converge". When the NCAR meteorologists (who answer the question "what will the weather be like?" by looking out the window) tried to put their models up on the CDC6500, they didn't work. They insisted that the Fortran compiler do the normalization for them. Kay cited this as evidence that their model was wrong. Hmph, it's easy to make fun of meteorologists...) Kay cited Minsky's Turing award lecture, in the Apr. 1970 JACM (or maybe CACM, I didn't catch it): "Form and content aren't enough." What has happened to the computer science field over the last twenty years is myopia: "a myopia so acute that only the very brilliant can achieve it." As an example of this, Kay cited the decline from the STS940 in 1965 to UNIX ("a mere shadow of what an operating system should be") to CPM. The myopia in question is best illustrated by a failure of Kay's own: "When we got our first IMSAI (mumble) we put Smalltalk up on it. We had to do a lot of machine coding on it, and we thought that wasn't right. And it performed about as well as BASIC does today. We said 'This is clearly inadequate. What we need is 2Mb of memory and a fast disk.' Thus we left the door open for BASIC to crawl back out of its crypt." He should be lynched. At least he realizes the error of his ways. He cited an article by Vannevar Bush, in a 1945 Atlantic Monthly, titled, "As we may think", in which Bush described a multi-screened, pointer-based system with access to the world's libraries, drawing programs, etc. Bush, of course, thought it was just a few years away (he called it "Memex"). He alluded to Minsky's notion of "science-envy": Natural scientists look at the universe and discover its laws. Computer scientists make up their universes. "What we do is more like an art." "You can judge whether or not a field is overcome by science-envy if it sticks the word 'science' into its name: 'computer science', 'cognitive science', 'political science'..." He talked about some of his early work, with Ed Teitel, developing an early personal computer (ca. 1965) calligraphic display with a pointer. It had "a wonderful language I developed, influenced by Sutherland's Sketchpad (the best thesis ever done in computer science) and Simula--everything I've ever done has been influenced by Sketchpad and Simula). Everyone who tried to use it hated it. They all had about the same reaction to it that everyone has to APL today." Shortly after working on this he saw Papert's work with LOGO and children, and resolved that everything he did from that day forth would be programmable by children. Part of the machine's problem stemmed from the fact that it didn't have enough memory. This in turn stems from the fact that we cast hardware in concrete before we know what we're going to do with it. Some relevant maxims from my notes: "Hardware is software crysallized early." "We shouldn't try to build a supercomputer until we have something to compute." His point in these two maxims was, I think, that we're very good at ***Sender closed connection*** === Network Mail from host sri-ai on Tue Apr 3 23:59:34 ===