Happy birthday, Alan Keyǃ (or how to get +80 to IQ)

“I have never been a strong programmer, and this has stimulated me to create new powerful languages. Today I work in two directions: metaprogramming and programming “childishly”, for children aged 9-14 years. ”
- Alan Curtis Kay.



It seems that this guy participated in all the institutes of advanced development related to IT.
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- Worked in the legendary Xerox PARC, Atari, Apple, Disney, HP.
- Proposed the concept of Dynabook (in 1968), which defined the conceptual basis for a laptop, tablet computer and e-book.
- One of the "founding fathers" of object-oriented programming ( SmallTalk , 1969).
- Participated in the creation of the first personal computer Xerox Alto (1973).
- The initiator of the useful movement "Every child on the laptop."
- In 2001, he founded the Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children, education and advanced software development.
- In 2006, threw a daring challenge to the industry - announced the possibility of creating an operating system with a graphical interface of 20,000 lines of code .

“Changing points of view gives +80 to IQ”
(A change in perspective is worth 80 IQ points)

And again, Alan Kay is a key figure in IT, and at the same time only a half of the translated articles on the Internet. And they know about him, most likely, by his quotes. Under the cut - quotes and a little husk from Kay's articles. Well, great performance at TED.

Together with colleagues from EDISON we wish Alan Kay a happy birthday!

Quotes

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." (Actually the author of the quote is Dennis Gabor, the investigation is here .)

“The future does not spread in front of us like a road. This is something that we choose for ourselves, and as long as we do not break any laws of the Universe, we can make it work the way we want. ”

"Technology is all that was not when you were born."

“Those who are serious about developing software make their own hardware.”

“The Internet was made so well that many people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, and not as something that is made by man. When was the last time a technology of this scale worked without errors? In comparison, the web is a joke. The web was made by amateurs. ”

"LISP is the greatest programming language ever created."

“It finally reached me that the half-page code at the bottom of the thirteenth page of the LISP 1.5 manual is LISP written on itself. For software development, it’s like Maxwell’s equations for physics. ”

"I came up with the term" object-oriented, "and I assure you that I did not mean C ++."

“I regret having coined the term“ objects ”many years ago, because it forces people to concentrate on small ideas. The really big idea is messages. ”

"Thanks to mathematical education, I realized that every object can have several algebras associated with it, perhaps even entire families, and they can be very, very useful."

"The key to making large and expanding systems is to figure out how modules will communicate with each other, rather than take care of their internal properties and behavior."

"I thought of objects as living cells or as individual computers on a network that exchange messages."

“One of the key ideas is to make systems that would continue to work during testing and, in particular, during making changes. Even big changes should be incremental and spend no more than a second before it takes effect. ”

“I think that the only type of science that programming can be like is the science of building bridges. Someone builds bridges, while others disassemble them, put forward more advanced theories, and thus construction continues. ”

"The second step was to understand the LISP language and use this understanding to make stronger and more connected underlying structures."

“Until we figure out how to really develop software, the solution could be the creation of dynamic systems with extremely late binding in all its manifestations.”

"Late binding allows you to embody ideas at a later stage of development with exponentially less effort than traditional early binding in C, C ++, Java, and other similar languages."

“If you use language with early binding, as most people do, instead of language with late binding, you will find yourself locked up in the work done. It will not be easy to reformulate something. ”

“Object-oriented programming for me means only sending messages, local retention and protection, as well as hiding state-processes, and extremely late binding of everything. This can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There may be other systems where this is possible, but they are unknown to me. ”

“I don’t mind types, but I don’t know a single type system that wouldn’t cause torment, so I’m still in favor of dynamic typing.”

“It is well known that I wanted to destroy Smalltalk in the late seventies. There were several years when he was the most powerful tool in the world. He responded to the needs in a more compact and beautiful way than all that was before him. But time has passed. When we understood more and became more ambitious, we decided that there was a lot of things in Smalltalk that did not scale as they should. For example, the reflection mechanism that was there. Smalltalk was one of the first languages ​​that could “see itself,” but at that time we already understood how to make different levels of reflections better, and had to realize this understanding. ”

Books

“When I went to school, I already read a couple of hundred books. I knew in the first grade that they were lying to me because I already had my own point of view. They (the teachers) did not like the idea of ​​different points of view, so it was a battle. ”

Alan Kay outlined three learning methods.

“The first is memorization of instructive stories; sometimes they are formulated in the form of aphorisms, proverbs and sayings. These are folk legends, folklore ...
The second method is the method of logical reasoning, the method of studying chains of cause-effect relationships. This is the way of mathematics and formal logic.
The third method is the method of "system dynamics". The method of creating intuitive pictures of the behavior of certain objects and systems belonging to the outside world in the brain ”.

“The book - the main keeper of the achievements of Civilization - is suitable for the transfer of knowledge when using the first and second of the considered methods. In the book you can collect wonderful stories, wise aphorisms and instructive sayings. In the book, you can set out a mathematical discipline. But the book is practically not suitable for the transfer of knowledge by the method of "system dynamics". "

Alan himself says that he reads 300 books a year

Articles

Biography of Alan Kay and key achievements

Pcweek
(Extracts from some articles by Alan Kay)
“American business is completely fucked up because it is all about competition. But our world was created for mutually beneficial cooperation, and this is exactly what we need to train people. The best analogy is team sports. ”
Why Alan Kay dislikes Wikipedia, PowerPoint, OOP, and programming patterns

Thousands of compact code
Thousand-fold compact code] [

How to raise people from our kids with the help of IT
Why do kids think in differential geometry categories?
Alan Kay about the future of programming

Computerra
System STEPS: twenty thousand lines of code that will change the programming, operating systems and the Internet
Counterargument on Habré

Ted

A powerful idea about ideas

PS

If anyone is willing to help with the translation of the article by Alan Kay, contact me in person or by mail (in profile).