Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 11th Jul 2012 10:15 UTC
In the News Andrew Binstock interviews Alan Kay, and there are just so many fantastic quotes and insights in there I have no idea what to pick as the OSNews item. This one? "Pop culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future - it's living in the present," Kay argues, "I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from] - and the Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs." What about this gem? "I was never a great programmer. That's what got me into making more powerful programming languages." Or, my personal favourite: "My interest in education is unglamorous. I don't have an enormous desire to help children, but I have an enormous desire to create better adults." Read this. Now. That's an order.
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Nth_Man
Member since:
2010-05-16

Maybe it is you that needs to learn from history.

Maybe it is you that needs to learn from history.

> Alan Kay was already speaking about objects
We don't even know if that was true. And if it was true, then are really "objects" what he talked about? Even if it was also true, that doesn't demonstrate that he was "The inventor of object-orientation". And as we know, a Wikipedia page is not a valid reference (there have been a big amount of Wikipedia pages that simply told what it wasn't true. They have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Criticisms but, that, also, is a Wikipedia page).

About software (and many other things) a working implementation demonstrates that the concepts were really thought because they are working there.

Edited 2012-07-11 16:30 UTC

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