20 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2024
  2. Dec 2023
    1. Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.

      I think I came up with this slogan at Parc during discussions wrt children, end-users, user-interfaces, and programming languages. Chuck Thacker (the genius behind the Parc hardware) also liked it and adopted it as a principle for many of his projects.

      Alan Kay's answer at Quora.

    1. In Smalltalk, we say that each object decides for itself how it responds to a message. This is called polymorphism. The same message selector may be sent to objects of different Classes. The shape (morph) of the computation is different depending on the specific class of the many (poly) possible classes of the object receiving the message.

      My math background made me realize that each object could have several algebras associated with it, and there could be families of these, and that these would be very very useful. The term "polymorphism" was imposed much later (I think by Peter Wegner) and it isn't quite valid, since it really comes from the nomenclature of functions, and I wanted quite a bit more than functions. I made up a term "genericity" for dealing with generic behaviors in a quasi-algebraic form.

      —Alan Kay Clarification of "object-oriented", email reply to Stefan Ram

    2. But just what is an object? At its simplest, an object has two components: Internal state. This is embodied by variables known only to the object. A variable only visible within the object is called a private variable. As a consequence, it is impossible – if the object decides so – to know the internal state of the object from another object. A repertoire of behaviors. These are the messages an object instance responds to. When the object receives a message it understands, it gets its behavior from a method with that name known by its class or superclass.

      Reductionistic vs other definitions

      Is the annotated paragraph describing what is an object or how is an object? This same criticism is also present in Dave West's Object Thinking.

      Other perspectives:

      Smalltalk's design—and existence—is due to the insight that everything we can describe can be represented by the recursive composition of a single kind of behavioral building block that hides its combination of state and process inside itself and can be dealt with only through the exchange of messages. Philosophically, Smalltalk's objects have much in common with the monads of Leibniz and the notions of 20th century physics and biology. Its way of making objects is quite Platonic in that some of them act as idealizations of concepts—Ideas—from which manifestations can be created. That the Ideas are themselves manifestations (of the Idea-Idea) and that the Idea-Idea is a-kind-of Manifestation-Idea—which is a-kind-of itself, so that the system is completely self-describing— would have been appreciated by Plato as an extremely practical joke.

      —Alan Kay Early History of Smalltalk (1972)

      So objects have something resembling agency, see the actor model.

      OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in Smalltalk and in LISP. There are possibly other systems in which this is possible, but I'm not aware of them.

      —Alan Kay Clarification of "object-oriented", email reply to Stefan Ram

      I also like the complementary view that Gerald Sussman teaches on his video lecture 5A that informs chapter 2 and 3 of SICP; objects are a cheap way of modelling the world.

  3. Oct 2023
    1. to the bottom of the next image, about a fifth of a second later, like that. And they're getting faster and faster each time, and if I stack these guys up, then we see the differences; the increase in the speed is constant. And they say, "Oh, yeah. Constant acceleration. And how shall we

      For anyone interested in this I would also recommend anything regarding etoys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prIwpKL57dMhttp://www.squeakland.org/

    2. And to prove it, she says, "The exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same, and I'm going to prove it to you." She does this with cardboard, but since I have an expensive computer here I'll just rotate this little guy around and ... Now having seen that -- and I've seen it hundreds of times, because I use this in every talk I give -- I still can't see that they're the same size and shape, and I doubt that you can either. So what do artists do? Well, what artists do is to measure. They measure very, very carefully. And if you measure very, very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge, you'll see that those two shapes are xactly the same size. And the Talmud saw this a long time ago, saying, "We see things not as they are, but as we are." I certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then,

      Example of the tables

    1. A Drawing of the FLEX Machine A Turrle Ena.. ,- “$IShown On Its Own Display Screen*c ‘T.L.,,8-= x-4c a . 1968[3]

      More infomation on the FLEX Machine I like the layout of this paper a lot.

    2. Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size andshape of an ordinary notebook. How would you use it if it had enough power to outrace yoursenses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalentsof reference materials, poems, letters, recipes, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms,dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to create, remember, and change?

      Fascinating how Even though we did realized some of this with the mobile phone we still have a system that's so fragmented that it's fundamentally getting in the way of progress

  4. Sep 2023
    1. 1: Why Do We Need Something Different? Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0004 Open the PDF Link PDF for 1: Why Do We Need Something Different? in another window 2: Questioning the Foundations of Traditional Safety Engineering Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0005 Open the PDF Link PDF for 2: Questioning the Foundations of Traditional Safety Engineering in another window 3: Systems Theory and Its Relationship to Safety Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0006 Open the PDF Link PDF for 3: Systems Theory and Its Relationship to Safety in another window II: STAMP: An Accident Model Based On Systems Theory [ Opening ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0029 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Opening ] in another window 4: A Systems-Theoretic View of Causality Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0008 Open the PDF Link PDF for 4: A Systems-Theoretic View of Causality in another window 5: A Friendly Fire Accident Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0009 Open the PDF Link PDF for 5: A Friendly Fire Accident in another window III: Using STAMP [ Opening ] Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0030 Open the PDF Link PDF for [ Opening ] in another window 6: Engineering and Operating Safer Systems Using STAMP Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0011 Open the PDF Link PDF for 6: Engineering and Operating Safer Systems Using STAMP in another window 7: Fundamentals Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0012 Open the PDF Link PDF for 7: Fundamentals in another window 8: STPA: A New Hazard Analysis Technique Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0013 Open the PDF Link PDF for 8: STPA: A New Hazard Analysis Technique in another window 9: Safety-Guided Design Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0014 Open the PDF Link PDF for 9: Safety-Guided Design in another window 10: Integrating Safety into System Engineering Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0015 Open the PDF Link PDF for 10: Integrating Safety into System Engineering in another window 11: Analyzing Accidents and Incidents (CAST) Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0016 Open the PDF Link PDF for 11: Analyzing Accidents and Incidents (CAST) in another window 12: Controlling Safety during Operations Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0017 Open the PDF Link PDF for 12: Controlling Safety during Operations in another window 13: Managing Safety and the Safety Culture Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0018 Open the PDF Link PDF for 13: Managing Safety and the Safety Culture in another window 14: SUBSAFE: An Example of a Successful Safety Program Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0019 Open the PDF Link PDF for 14: SUBSAFE: An Example of a Successful Safety Program in another window Epilogue Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0020 Open the PDF Link PDF for Epilogue in another window Appendixes A: Definitions Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0022 Open the PDF Link PDF for A: Definitions in another window B: The Loss of a Satellite Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0023 Open the PDF Link PDF for B: The Loss of a Satellite in another window C: A Bacterial Contamination of a Public Water Supply Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0024 Open the PDF Link PDF for C: A Bacterial Contamination of a Public Water Supply in another window D: A Brief Introduction to System Dynamics Modeling Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0025 Open the PDF Link PDF for D: A Brief Introduction to System Dynamics Modeling in another window References Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0026 Open the PDF Link PDF for References in another window Index Doi: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8179.003.0027 Open the PDF Link PDF

      Great resources here

    1. this system by giving it desired goals and it will figure out how to do these goals so again he wants uh to put a hole in this flange so that he says make these guys uh parallel and mutually perpendicular and then he says i want these gu lines to be collinear
  5. Apr 2023
    1. dans les images avec ordinateur, nous ne pouvons même pas suspecter quel type d’imagination conceptuelle le futur nous réserve

      Alan Kay soulève quelque chose comme ça («l’ordinateur est un métamédium!» s’exclame-t-il): l’ordinateur peut «contenir» plusieurs médias différents (textes, image, son, vidéo…), ceux qui ont déjà été inventés mais aussi potentiellement ceux qui seront un jour inventés (qu’on ne connaît pas encore). De plus, il y a de nouveaux «langages» des médias grâce à l’avènement du numérique (Lev Manovich, <cite>The Language of New Media</cite>, 2002).

      At the end of the 1977 article that served as the basis for our discussion in this chapter, Kay and Goldberg summarize their arguments in the phrase—which in my view is the best formulation we have had so far—of what computational media is artistically and culturally. They call the computer <mark>“a metamedium” whose content is “a wide range of already-existing and not-yet-invented media.”</mark>

      —Lev Manovich, <cite>Software Takes Command</cite>, 2013

  6. Mar 2023
    1. à différentes strates de compétences

      C’est l’idée de l’accès à l’informatique plus généralement d’Alan Kay (la possibilité d’accéder à plusieurs niveaux, bas et haut).

  7. Mar 2022
  8. Feb 2021
    1. We had a contest [at CDG] to come up with the most innocuous name that didn’t sound ridiculous. “Communications Design Group” is pretty vague, because what we’re likely to [invent] will be something other than what we’d put on a list. [But] the communication and design aspects do mean something. People communicate with each other, with themselves, in groups, with computers, and computers communicate with each other. If you take all the things in the world that can communicate and think of a future in which all those communications are qualitatively richer, then you have a vision.We live in a world full of hype. When I look at most of the Silicon Valley companies [claiming to do invention research], they’re really selling pop culture. Pop culture is very incremental and is about creating things other than high impact. Being able to do things that change what business means is going to have a huge impact–more than something that changes what social interaction means in pop culture.

      我们[在CDG]举办了一场比赛,选出一个听起来不荒唐、最无害的名字。"通信设计小组"是相当模糊的,因为我们可能(发明)的东西将不是我们列在清单上的东西。(但是)通信和设计方面确实是有意义的。人们彼此交流,与自己交流,与群体交流,与计算机交流,而计算机也彼此交流。如果你把世界上所有可以交流的东西都放在一起,想象未来所有这些交流在质量上都更加丰富,那么你就有了一个愿景。

      我们生活在一个充满炒作的世界里。当我看到大多数硅谷公司(声称从事发明研究)时,他们实际上是在推销流行文化。流行文化是渐进式的,它创造的不是高影响力的东西。能够做一些改变商业意义的事情将会产生巨大的影响,而不仅仅是改变社会互动在流行文化中的意义。

  9. Jul 2019
    1. One way to look at this is that when a new powerful medium of expression comes along that was not enough in our genes to be part of traditional cultures, it is something we need to learn how to get fluent with and use. Without the special learning, the new media will be mostly used to automate the old forms of thought. This will also have effects, especially if the new media is more efficient at what the old did: this can result in gluts, that act like legal drugs (as indeed are the industrial revolution’s ability to create sugar and fat, it can also overproduce stories, news, status, and new ways for oral discourse.
    2. To understand what has happened, we only need to look at the history of writing and printing to note two very different consequences (a) the first, a vast change over the last 450 years in how the physical and social worlds are dealt with via the inventions of modern science and governance, and (b) that most people who read at all still mostly read fiction, self-help and religion books, and cookbooks, etc.* (all topics that would be familiar to any cave-person).
  10. Jun 2019
    1. Bob Barton [said] "The basic principle of recursive design is to make the parts have the same power as the whole." For the first time I thought of the whole as the entire computer, and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it up into little computers... Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure?